CANNES, France — "Bright Star" gives actor Ben Whishaw a chance to shine.
Jane Campion's film about the love affair between poet John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne is a critics' favorite at the Cannes Film Festival and could win Campion a second Palme d'Or to put next to the one she took home in 1993 for "The Piano."
It should also be a breakout role for 28-year-old British actor Whishaw. He is a haunting presence in the quiet, luminous movie as Keats, who wrote some of the best-loved poems in the English language, including "Ode to a Nightingale," and died of tuberculosis at 25.
Keats' poems received a critical drubbing in his lifetime, and before Whishaw got the part he didn't consider himself a fan of the Romantic poet either.
"In Keats's day, the quality of his writing that got up people's noses was that it was so emotional and so sensual and considered to be unmanly because of this emphasis on feeling," Whishaw said in an interview. "I think probably that was what my prejudice was.
"It is hugely emotional work. I learned to love that and embrace it. And of course his greatest poems, like the odes, are really a lot about death as well, and about transience — serious stuff."
With his dark eyes, pale skin and thick black air, Whishaw cuts a striking yet spectral figure in a dim Cannes hotel ballroom. On-screen, his sickly Keats is fragile and vulnerable, but with a resolute core, determined his love should endure even as he senses death is near.
The actor has had starring roles on British TV — he was memorable as a young man imprisoned for murder in the 2008 BBC miniseries "Criminal Justice" — and was an acclaimed stage Hamlet at London's Old Vic when he was just 23.
On the big screen he has played a dissolute aristocrat in "Brideshead Revisited," a scent-obsessed murderer in "Perfume" and one of several versions of Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There."
Bright Star" — the title comes from a Keats sonnet — also stars Australian actress Abbie Cornish ("Somersault," "Stop-Loss") as Brawne, a Regency fashionista who sews her own fabulously colorful clothes. Keats initially finds Fanny annoyingly trivial, but soon recognizes her as a soul mate — to the alarm of both his possessive friend Charles Brown and of her family, alarmed to see Fanny falling for a penniless poet.
Theirs is an intense but largely chaste romance. Constrained by ever-present friends and family, and by the social mores of early 19th-century England, the pair scarcely even kiss.
"It is chaste by today's standards, but just because they don't have sex doesn't mean it's not a really physical, sensual relationship," Whishaw said.
"Something as simple as the touch of a hand can mean a lot, can carry a lot of feeling and meaning."
It's to the credit of Campion, Whishaw and Cornish that the film draws emotional power from little more than smoldering glances. Whishaw said Campion had the actors rehearse for four weeks before shooting started, sometimes running through scenes, at others simply talking, "or just lying on a bed looking out the window."
"I think Jane wanted us primarily to use the time to get to know each other, and to break down our fears, about each other and about the parts we were playing," Whishaw said.
Campion said she deliberately chose emerging actors who could really become Keats and Brawne for the film's viewers.
"There are some actors who have got big enough names to have helped us with the budget a lot more, but they might have hurt audiences being able to receive the film in such a fresh way," she said. "We were lucky to be able to bring two such amazing young actors to a new audience who hadn't met them."
Whishaw says he hasn't yet decided on his next project, but has decided that for now theater and TV will have to take a back seat to films.
"That is still the area that I know least about," he said, "and that I'd most like to get better at doing."