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REVIEWS


Wuthering Heights REVIEWED BY LEE MARSHALL


Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of Emily Bronte’s lit- erary classic Wuthering Heights is not a loveable film, but it is a courageous and impressive one. What makes it is also what mars it: a poetic, intensely auteurish take on the material that more than once comes between us and the story. In a sense, Arnold captures the essence of Bron-


te’s dark and windswept tale far more accurately than William Wyler’s 1939 version with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as Heathcliff and Cathy. Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is not a bodice-ripper but a story of obsession, revenge and cruelty both physical and emotional. But at least Wyler’s film put its romantic cards on the table; Arnold, on the other hand, seems to be circling the material hesi- tantly, as if trying to work out her take on the story while making the film. She also throws down the gauntlet to audiences


— and by extension, distributors and exhibitors — with her impressionistic handheld visual style, choice of boxy 3:4 format (though this is used bril- liantly), casting of non-professional actors and relatively low-profile professional ones, pared- back dialogue and plot, and refusal to grant us the relief, or the alibi, of a musical soundtrack. All these factors, plus the film’s slow pace and


two-and-a-bit hours running time, make the film a challenging commercial prospect. Wuthering Heights is resolutely arthouse, and more likely to enjoy a succes d’estime than the box-office variety. In common with most other film adaptations,


Arnold chooses to recount only the first part of Bronte’s novel — that dealing with the tragic love story between Heathcliff and Catherine, or Cathy. Advance reports on the film made much of Arnold’s decision to cast two black actors as the younger and older Heathcliff — the Liverpool waif who stern but charitable Yorkshire farmer Mr Earnshaw (Hilton) takes pity on and brings back to live with his family on the moors. Bronte herself has Earnshaw refer to him as “dark almost as if it came from the devil”, and the ploy does not feel too much of a stretch.


n 12 Screen International at the Toronto Film Festival September 9, 2011


SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS


UK. 2011. 128mins Director Andrea Arnold Production companies Film4, UK Film Council, Goldcrest Film Production LLP, Screen Yorkshire, HanWay Films, Ecosse Films Production International sales HanWay Films, www. hanwayfilms.com Producers Robert Bernstein, Douglas Rae, Kevin Loader Screenplay Andrea Arnold, Olivia Hetreed Cinematography Robbie Ryan Editor Nicolas Chaudeurge Production design Helen Scott Main cast Kaya Scodelario, James Howson, Solomon Glave, Shannon Beer, Oliver Milburn, Simone Jackson, Lee Shaw, Nichola Burley, Paul Hilton, James Northcote


For what clearly interests Arnold and co-script-


writer Olivia Hetreed is Heathcliff ’s outsider sta- tus: this is a story about a proud but indelibly ‘different’ boy who is never fully accepted into the family that adopts him, and ends up, after the death of the man who took him in, being kept on as the family servant and relegated to the stable. In the first part of the film, as the young Heath-


cliff (Glave) bonds with Earnshaw’s carefree child- of-nature daughter Cathy (Beer, the most natural of Arnold’s first timers) and incurs the hatred of Earn- shaw’s older natural son, Hindley (Shaw), his wary, watchful nature is stressed: this is a child who is used to beatings and rejections but who registers everything that is done to him, good or bad, and never forgets. He and Cathy — children, as Bronte wrote them, rather than the young adults of Wyler’s film — roam the moors, climb misty peaks, tussle in the mud, observe nature and become inseparable soul mates without kissing once. Much time is spent on bonding with nature,


relatively little on key plot cruxes such as Earn- shaw’s death, Cathy’s adoption by the well-off Lin- ton family, Heathcliff ’s overhearing of her intention to marry Edgar Linton (Northcote), even though she really loves Heathcliff — a revelation that spurs him to run away from the farm.


He returns an older and richer man (now


played by the sometimes inexpressive Howson, whose casting is not the best of Arnold’s non-pro- fessional choices), to find Cathy (now Scodelario) has married Edgar and become the mistress of his substantial family house, Thrushcross Grange. It is Heathcliff ’s inability to stay away from her,


and Cathy’s continued devotion to Heathcliff, that will precipitate events towards their tragic conclu- sion. In this section, Arnold seems sometimes to defy the audience, deliberately wrecking the sym- pathy she had built up in part one by showing Heathcliff hanging dogs for pleasure, marrying Edgar’s sister just to get to Cathy and then mis- treating her, humiliating Hindley. Some of these things may be in the book, but novels convey nar- rative detachment and cynicism better than films. Other directorial decisions seem almost perverse


— the incongruous 1970s-style credit font; the one piece of non-diegetic soundtrack music, a song by contemporary UK folksters Mumford & Sons right at the end, which seems a pointless last-hurdle stumble into sentiment. Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is an often beautiful and haunting cinematic experi- ment, but we miss the energy of Fish Tank. Paradox- ically, for all the explosive emotion of its source material, this is a curiously poised and dry-eyed film.


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