Guest Post from Venice

Reporting from the Venice Film Festival, HD Silversmith, film professor, published author and good friend of Brontëblog reviews Wuthering Heights 2011:

It's hard to know what to make of Andrea Arnold's new film Wuthering Heights, which I saw yesterday afternoon at the Venice Film Festival, and maybe that has something to do with me: the dialogue was so stripped down (yes, even from the novel) and incomprehensibly articulated by the actors who played young Cathy and young Heathcliff that I found myself looking to the Italian subtitles for translation.

And here's the thing: I don't speak Italian.

This isn't to say that these first-time actors were bad: they weren't, necessarily. It's just that their scenes depended less on dialogue and more on the cinematic rendering Arnold tries to give the relationship between them and a natural, if both brutal and beautiful, order of things, and that choice makes it difficult to judge the acting. I've always found Heathcliff a brutal character and the world of Wuthering Heights a strange and somewhat frightening one, and so there are ways in which Arnold's countless shots of dead game, plucked fowls, insects, mud, and muck are spot-on. They permeate the film, sometimes almost to the point of abstraction. Shot on location, the landscape is omnipresent, as it should be, and Cathy's and Heathcliff''s love of it is evident.

But if you're waiting to hear Cathy's immortal "Nelly, I am Heathcliff!" or Heathcliff's profane prayer that Cathy haunt him because he cannot live without his soul, well ... don't. They're simply not there. It's as if Arnold's film is a kind of palimpsest that evokes Brontë's novel and performs a reading of it but tells its own story on top of it, right next to it, adjoining it, instead.

To a degree, it's a story of racism. Arnold cast Solomon Glave and James Howson as the young and adult Heathcliff, respectively, recasting the tale of Brontë's "gypsy beggar" as a story of a black man who faces unrelenting bias and cruelty at the hands of different strata of white society (Hindley Earnshaw, Edgar Linton). It's not an unreasonable transformation -- Brontë's Heathcliff is clearly positioned as a cultural outsider as well. However, in defining Heathcliff's otherness almost exclusively in social and cultural terms, Arnold also strips him of that indefinable aspect of otherness that has always exceeded explanation and forned part of his bond with Cathy. Self and other, self as other ... this is the tension that Brontë's novel has articulated so forcefully and that has gone missing in Arnold's treatment.

Don't go to Wuthering Heights looking for romance because it's almost wholly absent (translation: this is not your grandmother's Wuthering Heights, or William Wyler's 1939 adaptation of it with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the leading roles). The camerawork is often hand-held, there's no musical soundtrack (though the sounds of nature form an aural backdrop that's compelling), and the narrative and character through-line are provided mostly by one's working knowledge of the novel, against which I was always glossing the film, which is otherwise mostly inscrutable.

I don't expect the film to do well at the box office, precisely because of some of the elements I've just discussed. For me, it doesn't entirely cohere, even on its own terms. But it's an intelligent film, a film with thought behind it. and for that reason alone it's worth seeing once.

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights