Wuthering Heights in Venice. Reactions (III)

Positive:

London Evening Standard:

Andrea Arnold, director of the gritty and award-winning Red Road and Fish Tank, has forged an audacious version of the Emily Brontë classic which is pitch black, spare of dialogue and presenting a rustic world from which there is no escape. (...)
Beautifully shot in natural light in Yorkshire by Robbie Ryan, the film contrasts the muddy, weatherbeaten harshness of the Earnshaw Farm, where Heathcliff is brought up (and where local sheep farmers play small roles) with the polite society of Cathy's home at the Grange. Nature, as in the book, plays a strong part in every aspect of the story.
This is an updating in tone rather than time, often without the essential explosiveness of the book. But it's one way of reinterpreting Brontë's words and visually, at least, an extraordinary achievement. (Derek Malcolm)

Mostly Positive: 
Screen Daily:

Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s literary 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. (...)
Other directorial decisions seem almost perverse - the incongruous seventies-style credit font; the one piece of non-diegetic soundtrack music, a song by contempo British 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 experiment. (Lee Marshall)

The Independent:

She has made a defiantly art-house adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic that is from the school of Robert Bresson rather than Merchant Ivory.
The camera is mostly hand-held and follows the protagonists around with the zeal of the Dardenne brothers. The acting, by mostly non-actors, is full of lines delivered with plenty of reserve. The sex scenes are raw and dirty.(...)
Most surprisingly she has repackaged the story as a race drama. Her Heathcliff is a poor young black boy (Solomon Glave) who is treated like dirt by the white community tilling the Yorkshire Moors. It is easy to see her Heathcliff as a modern-day Barry Lyndon and making him black works best as a tool to allow Arnold to pare down the dialogue and tell the tale with minimal discourse. (...)
What really fascinates is how Arnold has completely deprived the story of any romance. This is a story of emotional repression. The protagonists only realise the cost of love when it's way too late. When Heathcliff returns as an adult (James Howson) his motivations are as grey as the clouds. However, in pushing the story so far in this direction, Arnold has lost some of the magic of the text, which makes it far more difficult to have any emotional connection with the characters. (Kaleem Aftab)

Incontention:

This is a “Wuthering Heights” of weather and flesh and grass and locked eyes, one that has the simple common sense and staggering cinematic wherewithal to know that great adaptations don’t beat great writers at their own game; they play a new game entirely.  (...)
There’s an elemental construction and discomfiting, hand-in-face tightness at play in Arnold and her ingenious DP Robbie Ryan’s image system that recalls nothing so much as the dusky fevers of French experimentalist Philippe Grandrieux, its claustrophobia amplified by their decision, once more, to shoot in the boxy Academy ratio — though the clean, constant, near-tangible presence of a slicing Yorkshire wind at least provides some breathing room. (...)
Rather than a jagged collage of (extraordinarily) pretty images, Arnold and Ryan have collated an intricately visceral pictorial conversation of temporal and seasonal details — blizzards of plucked goose feathers, makeshift mattresses of heather, bloodied garlands of hunted hares, or the white spring light squinting through an apple tree — that not only reinterpret the verbal atmospherics of Brontë’s prose, but make an explicitly earthy beast of Heathcliff and Cathy’s love, a bond that has never seemed comfortably contained in man-made walls. (Guy Lodge)

Mostly negative:
CineVue:

Almost the entire focus of Arnold's Wuthering Heights is on the beautiful and sometimes savage backdrop of the Yorkshire moors. Arnold has mentioned wanting to "honour the essence" of Emily Brontë's novel and she has done this by so closely binding the animus of both Heathcliff and Cathy to their natural setting that the human characters become intertwined and irrevocably linked to their surroundings. (...)
At a little over two hours, Wuthering Heights can often make arduous viewing. With little dialogue – a lot of it often wooden – and virtually no music it is up to the viewer to take what they can from the rich imagery in the film. A lot of critics at the screening in Venice were exasperated by the wildlife scenes and it was not well received by the majority. However, if you are patient, what you will take with you from this film is the splendour of the moors and their inexorable link with the lovers of Wuthering Heights. Like the names carved into the wood, this film will stay with you long after you’ve left the cinema. (Jo-Ann Titmarsh)

The Daily Mail writes about the premiere of Andrea Arnold's film in Venice with pictures of the photocall and the premiere:

The 18-year-old [Kaya Scodelario] looked gorgeous in a short navy dress for a photo-call before changing into a full-length evening gown for the premiere.
James [Howson] wore the same grey trousers and blue shirt but ripped off his tie for the later event. (...)
The new movie is likely to shock fans of the novel with moments of nudity and swearing.
But Andrea Arnold said she thought Emily Brontë would approve.
'I really wanted to honour Brontë. Wuthering Heights is a strange, dark and profound book and I wanted to honour that spirit. I made decisions that felt true to me but also to the spirit of the book. (Alanah Eriksen)

More red carpet pictures can be seen on Look.

The Hollywood Reporter talks about the film's screening in Venice:

Wuthering Heights, which stars Kaya Scodelario and James Howson as Cathy and Heathcliff, respectively, screened to a sold out Sala Grande crowd for an unorthodox adaptation of the classic story. In this version, Heathcliff is black, the story is removed from its mid-19th century context, and the screenplay is peppered with occasional profanity and nudity.  (Eric J. Lyman)

Shannon Beer's dress in yesterday's photocall is described as

British actress Shannon Beer was dressed by a superannuated Star Trek costume designer for the screening of "Wuthering Heights" at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday.

by The Globe and Mail but the Atlanta Fashion Examiner loved it:

Actresses Kaya Scodelario and Shannon Beer looked lovely as they stood for the photocall of Wuthering Heights in their teal and periwinkle dresses!
Later on, Shannon Beer attended the "Wuthering Heights" premiere in her gorgeous fuchsia goddess dress with the glittery silver braids criss-crossing, which she accessorized with the silver clutch bag.
Kaya Scodelario chose to wear a lovely Edwardian looking beige lace gown with a plunging V-neck at the Wuthering Heights premiere, which she accessorized with a black clutch bag and matching sandals. (Amber Cornelio)

The Telegraph reports that the film will be screened at the upcoming London Film Festival (in October) (it's one of the Time Out picks for the festival). Nevertheless, the first chance to see Wuthering Heights after Venice will be in Toronto and National Post recommends it for 'English lit majors'. Also in The Telegraph a brief summary of the film. For more comments check also The Independent, Metro, The Huffington Post, Harper's Bazaar, Just Jared Jr, Belfast Telegraph ...

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights