Cannes - New Zealand-born director Jane Campion has skilfully avoided the cliches of a period drama to tell her story of an unlikely and tragic love match between the 19th century British poet John Keats and his neighbour, Fanny Brawne. Indeed, the two characters could not be more different in Campion's film Bright Star, which screened Friday at the Cannes Film Festival.
Fanny, played by Australian actress Abbie Cornish, is a headstrong young woman who enjoys dancing and sees herself becoming a successful member of the fashion world.
Dancing and fashion are, however, not something that the penniless Keats, played by British actor Ben Whishaw, concerns himself with. Instead, he is struggling to carve out a name for himself as a poet against a barrage of less-than enthusiastic literary criticism and sickness.
"You absorb me," Keats tells Fanny as their love develops during the film.
"The story is so enchanting, it caught me unaware," Campion told a press conference in Cannes marking the film's premiere.
"I felt I had entered another planet," said Campion with her portrayal of Fanny very much in line with the strong women characters who dominate her movies.
This includes the mute woman in The Piano who was sent to 19th century New Zealand for an arranged marriage.
In 1993, Campion became the first woman to win Cannes' iconic and prestigious Palme d'Or for The Piano and believes it is time that more women took up the role of directors.
But she warned: "You have to develop a tough skin in filmmaking," she said. "Women are not use to that. Women have to put on their armour and get going."
After several lean years in movie making, Campion's film had been keenly awaited by critics.
"I felt butterflies," said Campion ahead of Bright Star's screening in Cannes. "I was both excited and fearful."
Set in 1818 in Hampstead, which was then a village on the edge of London, Campion gave her characters a modern touch while at the same time acknowledging the social mores of the time.
Fannie is almost always accompanied by her younger brother and sister where ever she goes.
Throughout Bright Star, Campion returns frequently to make the point of the claustrophobia of indoor life in 19th century Britain with the sense of sensuality and freshness of the outdoors.
"I think what was important was to tell an intimate story, but to keep the period film very simple and not to focus on the grand houses and the costumes," she Campion.
"All I wanted was the sense of the characters being there; that they had a presence. It did not matter what time or century," she said.
The world may have entered an era of twittering, text messages and emails. However, Campion, who also wrote the screenplay for Bright Star, builds her story on the love letters than Keats wrote his young muse. He later dedicated a poem to her, Bright Star.
Bright Star opens with Fanny sewing. "All women sewed and they waited," said Campion. "It has a rhythm that for me is poetic," she said.
But only as the film starts to build towards its final crescendo does it really start to gain traction as the love between Keats and Fanny develops strength and depth.
Sewing, in a sense, provides the thread to the film and is a poignant symbol recurring as Keats and Fanny's story draws to a close.
Campion and the others said they had been so gripped and involved by this poignancy that they struggled to pull away from the story at the end of the movie's production.
"I am mourning it," said Whishaw.
