Wuthering Heights in Venice. Reactions (V)

Financial Times:

In Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights the volume is turned down. The acting is largely muted, the music non-existent (a cappella folk ditties apart), the dialogue commonplace going on mundane. Arnold, who gave us those pithily doleful tranches of Brit realism Red Road and Fish Tank, has performed a “literectomy”. She has torn Emily Brontë’s story from its bookish roots and made it scowl, gloom and mumble for modern audiences.
What she keeps is the period setting and the ferocity of nature. We are flung about in mud, drenched by rain, blown by winds, exulted by spring. The images, though squeezed into a squarish frame as if taken on an early box camera, are often overpoweringly beautiful.
What Arnold mainly changes – it will be blasphemy to some bibliophiles – is Heathcliff’s colour. He’s a delicate shade of black: an Afro-stray picked up from an English port. You could question whether this was possible socially or historically in 19th-century Britain. Coloured folk didn’t casually become foster children, even in remote Yorkshire. But it makes the “forbiddenness” of his love for Cathy, and hers for him, more palpable to modern picturegoers. And it amplifies the half-hidden acoustic of Brontë’s story. Here is a fable of foreignness and notional barbarism, rubbing up against civility so that we can see the sparks fly, the new, rough diamonds created. (Nigel Andrews)

Hindustan Times:

Though beautifully shot in natural light in Yorkshire by Robbie Ryan, the movie is true to Brontë’s work, but somewhere Arnold’s effort fails to create the mesmeric richness and tragic poignancy of the written classic.
I suppose such comparison between words and visuals are not exactly fair, but Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is such a part of our English reading that many of us would tend to feel a pang of disappointment at Arnold’s film. (Bautama Ghaskaran)

Variety:

Working further outside the safety net, Andrea Arnold fashioned something raw and vital with her revisionist, racially charged "Wuthering Heights." Though the film could be about 15 or 20 minutes shorter and is marred by some inexpert performances from its largely non-pro cast, its real star, d.p. Robbie Ryan, captures images of such wild, untamed beauty as to justify this umpteenth stab at Emily Brontë's novel. (It was certainly scheduled on the right day, as those of us rushing to see it found ourselves caught up in a brief but decidedly Brontë-esque windstorm.) (Justin Chang)

IndieWire:

[I]t had many things that were good (and Robbie Ryan’s cinematography, which was rather better than good) amid much that was not (the acting, the pacing, a general sense of self-indulgence and self-regard). It’s then kind of film you wish Harvey Weinstein could get his hands on and force its maker to cut a good 20 or so minutes out of it. It could easily bear it. (Shane Danielsen)

Tonight (South Africa) also mentions the film.

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights