Jane Campion, in her highly elegant state of art, delivers her most unbreakable and controlled cinematic beauty, Bright Star (2009). I must admit I am very much impressed with its photography as much as I am impressed with its writing. Bright Star is created not upon whim but upon heavy study, with great precision and grace, on the art of mise-en-scene, cinematography and of course, writing. How rich, one could say, a cinema artist could be on staging a piece of tale like a painting in a film or to place the subject of poetry at its heart! Filmmakers today are gifted with so many options for their craft, enlarged by the spectrum of technology they can choose from. Yet we see Jane Campion, faithfully using the same techniques for lighting, but carefully bending it for naturalistic cause to deliver not only atmosphere but beauty to the characters she was always in love with since The Piano (1993). The color gradient she used for Bright Star ranged from the bright ones (in the beginning) to the dark ones (in the end). However, this spectrum of visible light is dynamic throughout the film and it still remained the film's most salient style, much like that of Almodovar's but less vibrant and sharp. The diffuse quality of the lighting infused with the shade reminds me of the other Renoir. It is painting-film.
Lilac for beauty.
****The Meaning of Life - Yi Yi: A One and A Two (Yang, 2000)
Almost everyday, we have moments like this...
...questioning, once in while,
the purpose of our journeys.
Indeed, we never live the same day twice.
****
Ciao!
