A thing of beauty is a joy forever. And Jane Campion has made a beautiful film out of the sad story of John Keats’s hopeless romance with Fanny Brawne, the young woman who at first seemed unimpressed with him or his poetry but in the end became his muse. The danger is to tilt towards either prettiness or pretension, all the more so in a cynically unromantic age.

How do you make a film that doesn’t look like another admired BBC production? Campion’s answer is to use Keats’s poetry, and to take her inspiration from the letters and messages carefully preserved by Fanny after her lover’s death at the age of 25.

Aided by costumes and sets of a high but not too luxurious standard, she uses lighting to great effect and encourages superb performances from Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish as Fanny.

We see the two meet after Fanny has given Paul Schneider’s protective best friend Mr Brown a piece of her mind for telling her to leave the poet alone. The relationship begins warily but soon becomes a matter of fatal attraction.

The situation, however, is hopeless. Keats has no money and few prospects and marriage, in the view of Fanny’s mother (Kerry Fox) is impossible.

In the end sickness intervenes and Keats dies in Italy, leaving Fanny broken-hearted.

Whishaw’s Keats is never just a gaunt romantic poet seeking an impossible love. He seems a real man who is amazed at his reaction to Fanny.

Cornish’s Fanny is also properly flesh and blood, unable to help herself falling for a man whose poetry she at first can barely understand.

But Bright Star, a story of loss and love illustrated by poetry, seldom does more than gently move us. It is a fine film to look at and listen to but there are heights it fails to scale.