Adèle gets reviewed and Olivier's Heathcliff is remembered

The Scotsman reviews Emma Tennant's The French Dancer's Bastard

Why did Brontë introduce Varens into her novel? She needed a child for Eyre to teach, a reason for her going to Thornfield Hall and meeting Rochester, certainly. But Brontë was also enough of a craftswoman to realise that another intriguing back story for Rochester, besides his stay in the Caribbean, would not only add to the exotic nature of his past, it would add another nail in his coffin of dubious moral values - values that Eyre ultimately restores to him.

Tennant is not happy to rest with Adèle as either plot device or moral counterpoint. As she tells Adèle's story, we see the Paris where she spends her early childhood, a bohemian, artistic Paris that is about as far from industrialising Yorkshire, hemmed in by wild moors, as it is possible to get.

It is here, in this convivial atmosphere, that Adèle lives with her adored mother, Celine, a beautiful actress and performer who flirts with counts and has mime artists and political agitators for friends. The haphazard presence of the dour Englishman, Rochester, who pops up from time to time, disrupts this easygoing life for little Adèle, who doesn't approve of his attentions taking her mother away. But this is nothing compared to the moment when her mother leaves Paris. Adèle is abandoned and only Rochester can look after her now - there's a clear implication that he is the child's true father.

But Adèle never adapts to Yorkshire; the meek little girl obsessed by ribbons and bows that Brontë paints, hides a vengeful, angry child in Tennant's re-visioning. (...) And so it is back to Paris that Adèle runs, after Thornfield Hall is destroyed by fire, returning to a much more politicised city, where her mother's friend, Jenny, introduces her to the feminist cause.

This is an interesting and ingenious twist - Jane Eyre has long been read as a proto-feminist text, full of symbolism about a young girl's adolescence (...) Now Adèle becomes the independent woman, making a living for herself on the high wire ("I was also ecstatic in my new career, neither woman nor child as I swung and pirouetted above the crowd"). This is the time of radical clubs and George Sand, easy to remain ignorant of out in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors. (...)

Fans of Brontë's classic can be assured that Tennant's story - even when she gives new interpretations of well-known events - is a fascinating complement to the great original. (Amy Mathieson)

The Toronto Star interviews director Guillermo Del Toro that is presenting his new film El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth). The Mexican director remembers his first cinematic experience:

Q Wow. I know you've been drawing since you were a child. But do you remember the first movie you saw? (Geoff Pevere)

A I was a very young kid because my mother took me. It was Wuthering Heights – the Laurence Olivier version. It was beautiful, black and white, really dramatic. There was something in it. I slept through half of the movie on my mother's bosom then I woke up and continued watching. There was something sort of dreamlike about it.

It really seems an impacting memory because this is not the first time that he explains this story

Categories: In the News, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights, Sequels