After admiring the sheer beauty and attention to detail, one doesn’t half long to throw a couple of leopard-skin cushions into the mix. Anything to provide a break from all that wall-to-wall, ever so slightly dull good taste.

Poetry lovers and confirmed romantics should of course disregard such vulgar blethering. They will find this story of Keats’ relationship with Miss Fanny Brawne a thing of beauty, if not forever then at least for its 119 minutes running time. The rest of us, exercising a little patience, can find much here to admire, the performances of the two leads, Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish, for starters.

Bright Star is Campion’s first feature length offering since the daring, erotic thriller In the Cut in 2003. After that walk on the urban wild side with Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo, Bright Star finds her returning to the period drama territory she made her own with The Piano, the picture that won her on Oscar for best screenplay 10 years before.

The tale opens in 1818 in Hampstead, a time when the place was more heath than terraced homes. Eighteen-year-old Miss Brawne (Cornish) is indulging her passion for sewing, an activity Campion captures lovingly in the opening credits.

Brawne’s art, we can see from her jaunty apparel, is fashion. This is no flibbertigibbet, however. From her verbal jousting with Keats’s friend and fellow poet Charles Armitage Brown (played by the American actor Paul Schneider, struggling at times with a Scots accent), it is plain that the only impediment from which Brawne suffers is youth. She is smart enough to know that she has much to learn.

As such, she is fascinated by the young man next door, John Keats (Whishaw), despite his protestations that all he does is “lie about the room all day begging for inspiration”. Brawne wants to learn about poetry and, increasingly, one poet in particular.

Through various acts of kindness, including giving Keats gifts for his ailing younger brother, Brawne reveals herself to be a young woman of substance. Not in the eyes of Armitage Brown, however.

He sees her as the kind of distraction a great artist such as Keats can live without. Battle lines are drawn and the subsequent shouting matches provide a welcome balance to the rampant lovey-doviness.

Campion is a master of matt colours, her Hampstead interiors boasting what seems like an infinite number of greys, blacks and eggshell whites. While impressive, and frequently enlivened by Brawne’s fabric creations, such a flat palette can chill the bones after a time.

Equal subtlety is at work as she charts the relationship between Brawne and Keats. Their affection develops slowly, with Campion skilfully conveying the innocence of the pairing, and the customs of the times. No walk through the woods is possible without Brawne’s younger brother and sister in tow; even taking tea requires the presence of chaperones.

Though Keats is the older, it is Brawne who seems the more mature. Keats, however, is worldly enough to know that he is not in a position to marry Brawne.

Reliant on his rich friends for a home and an income, he has nothing to offer Brawne but his love and the fruits of his talent. It is for her that he writes Bright Star.

As Keats’ health begins to fail – if there’s a Bafta for elegant coughing Whishaw is a shoo-in – Campion picks up the pace. The walks grow longer, the tension between Brawne and Armitage Brown intensifies, and the letters between the young lovers, many of them necessitated by Keats journeying to warmer climes for his health, fly back and forth.

And that, with several helpings of Keats’ poetry to keep the tone resolutely highbrow, is that.

There is no doubting the depth of feeling between Keats and Brawne, with Whishaw and Brawne sighing and gazing up a storm. There’s a certain loveliness, too, in the way Campion stirs up eroticism at one remove, with the pair, in separate rooms, placing their hands against the walls to connect with each other.

Yet as the minutes pass into an hour the very formality and respectfulness of the piece becomes wearying. Back and forth we go with Brawne’s heart soaring and breaking, soaring and breaking.

Such outpouring ought to provoke a sympathetic reaction in the viewer, but there’s too much of it, for too long. Butterflies in a summer bedroom, tiptoeing through the bluebells, a tearstained face – the message is received, understood and transmitted over and over again.

It does not help any story, of course, to go in knowing how it ends. For a while that does not matter. Whishaw, one of the most compelling British actors of his generation, and the talented Cornish are a captivating couple. But the fascination they arouse, unlike the love portrayed here, has its earthly limits.

Bright Star (PG)

Star rating: ***

Dir: Jane Campion

With: Ben Whishaw, Abbie Cornish, Paul Schneider