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27 July 2011updated 05 Oct 2023 8:23am

Gilbey on Film: from bard to verse

What happens when movies take on poetry?

By Ryan Gilbey

There’s blood on the escritoires over at the Poetry Society. It has been in turmoil for some weeks following multiple resignations, and now there is the suspension of public funds by the Arts Council to contend with — all in the wake of what the Independent described as a “power struggle” between its former director and the editor of Poetry Review.

What, you may ask, has all this got to do with cinema? Well, I was thinking that we might at last have the germ of a decent film about poetry here — a back-stabbing Social Network-type affair (Hang ‘Em Haiku? Stanza and Deliver?) that could make up for decades of incompatibility between these two art forms, poetry and cinema.

It’s common for a film to earn the compliment of being called poetic, but when it comes to engaging with poetry itself, the two art forms feel uniquely out of sync with one another. Whenever cinema and poetry meet, the liaison is invariably punctuated by yawning silences where neither party knows exactly what to say or how to say it. The most visionary directors — such as Jane Campion in Bright Star — have caught the essence of verse, but committing the medium itself to film is as simple as nailing two eggs together. Dead Poets Society, Tom & Viv, Poetic Justice and significant parts of the recent Howl — all have failed to render the passion of poetry without lapsing into the prosaic. At least the version of Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” set to music in the 1980 film Fame had youthful sincerity on its side.

Lee Chang-Dong’s new film Poetry is an exception: it shows that poetry (and, by extension, art) can form part of a person’s very survival. Mija (Yoon Jeong-Hee), a woman in her sixties recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, enrols in a poetry class as a way of holding on to the language that has begun cruelly to desert her. So far, so Hollywood — sign up Sally Field for the remake.

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But where Poetry differs from that formula is in denying the audience an emotional spectacle or catharsis; at the very moment when you might expect poetry as a force to inspire the film’s characters to climb upon their desks proclaiming “O Captain! My Captain!”, it is reined in, the better to underline Mija’s private transformation. Writing poetry changes her (and I will leave viewers of the film to see exactly what form that change takes), but the picture shows how the most momentous internal revolutions often register as no more than a ripple on the surface.

Michael Radford’s 1995 Il Postino is not in the same league at all but it does at least argue for the importance of poetry in everyday life. It shows how poetry can be woven into us, and into our lives, whether or not we choose to recognise it; a rose by any other name, and all that jazz. Perhaps that’s one of the keys to making a good, unself-conscious film about poetry: to give the words their proper context, to show the life unfolding around them. That’s undoubtedly where Bright Star excels. Campion handles John Keats’s poems with special informality. The first excerpt to reach our ears — the opening stanza of Endymion (“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”) — is delivered in a child’s halting, sing-song voice, before her older sister snatches the book from her hands and silently completes the reading herself.

As Keats, Ben Whishaw is endearingly nervy, free of the reassuring hindsight with which so much period drama is played. A.O Scott in the New York Times wrote that viewers should “stay until the very last bit of the end credits, not necessarily to read the name of each gaffer and grip, but rather to savour every syllable of Mr. Whishaw’s recitation of ‘Ode to a Nightingale.'” High praise.

Poetry opens on Friday.

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