As recounted by Jane Campion, unusually taking sole screenwriting credit in addition to directing, the ill-starred love story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne is such as to make us ask ourselves when we last had on screen a love story we could believe in. (In the Mood for Love, maybe? 2001?) That, or more exactly the believability part of it, is truly saying something when the principal characters are so prone to recite poetry extemporaneously, not only the poet who wrote it — the perfect Platonic ideal of the Poet, or at any rate the Romantic incarnation of him — but also the smitten one who, having invested in a copy of Endymion "to see if he's an idiot or not," has committed his words to memory: incontrovertible evidence of love. This is a closely observed affair, followed with patience and fascination, from spark to flame, a bonding of hearts with no assistance from lower organs, what once went unashamedly and today goes blushingly by the name of True Love. Campion can often be candidly carnal, as in Sweetie, The Piano, Holy Smoke, and In the Cut, and she certainly here is highly sensual, making great play of birdsong, breezes, snow, rain, gauze curtains, flapping sheets on clotheslines, a roomful of butterflies, a human nest in a treetop, and while the inevitable Vermeery white light is nothing to get excited about, the color loses none of its vividness and precision for its paleness and delicacy. But the expressions of passion per se have been strictly limited to things like tender touches, first kiss, love letters, fetishistic fondling, and the physical pain of separation. The dirty deed is never approached, unless you can see a symbol in the needlework of the heroine, a cutting-edge fashionista of the early 19th Century, inspiration for some delightful period costumes. Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw, Paul Schneider, Kerry Fox, Edie Martin, Antonia Campbell-Hughes. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd