Wuthering Heights in Venice. Reactions (IV)

More reviews:
Positive

New York Times:

Emily Brontë concluded one of her few verses: “The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling/ Can center both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.” These words could well sum up the tortured love story of Cathy and Heathcliff in her only novel, to which many readers feel a deep attachment, treasuring vivid personal images of these characters.
Ms. Arnold’s casting of black actors, Solomon Glave as the young Heathcliff and James Howson as the older one, is in tune with the text — the novel puts great emphasis on his dark, gypsylike appearance, and on the mystery of the boy’s origins. It also serves to underline Heathcliff’s feeling that he is eternally apart, even while he and Cathy find themselves drawn into an overwhelming, elemental sense of shared identity.
The director has also taken the bold course of using minimal dialogue in a film of a book that contains torrents of spoken words, telling the story in almost entirely visual terms, with the human passions driving it represented in the harsh and tempestuous landscapes that are the setting, a strategy underpinned by some superb cinematography by Robin Ryan.  (Roderick Conway Morris)

Mostly positive:

Boston Herald:

Like most contemporary filmmakers her dilemma was how to take the passionate, gothic elements of a dark romance set in a world so distant from ours it might as well be Star Wars and make it accessible.  Arnold, whose Fish Tank was one of the glories of last year, dispenses with most of the dialogue, taking what I call a ‘60s-style Swedish approach where the camera observes behavior and lifestyle closely – it’s a technique Terrence Malick sort of uses as well but with more cuts.  She spends the first half of her two hour movie in a dingy North England farm where the young Cathy and Heathcliff are inseparable if not I believe sexual.  (...) Ultimately Arnold’s brave attempt seemed hardly romantic even as it was continually spellbinding. (Stephen Schaefer)

Bangkok Post:

Shifting style yet still in the terrain of teen angst, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights has received a new interpretation by Scottish director Andrea Arnoldl (...)  Shot in a 4:3 ratio rather than the wider 16:9, the film relies on close-ups, hushed exchanges, a woozy, hand-held camera following the characters on their many runs across the damp fields, and remarkable shots of everyday sensuality, like when young Catherine Earnshaw kisses the bleeding wounds of Heathcliff after he is caned. Director Arnold has given us an interiorised romance, where feeling simmers and obsession boils. In remaking a classic story, Arnold guns for modern aesthetics. And by making Heathcliff black _ another contentious decision _ the film increases the tension between the characters and gives the story's second half, when Heathcliff returns to the heights as a rich man, a whole new meaning.
The film will split the critics, but here's a Wuthering Heights like none you've seen before. (Kong Rithdee)

More reviews: The Reader Online, Curious Joe,

We don't know who reads or talks with Irish Times critic Donald Clarke, but they are not the same who we have reported in the previous days:

Wuthering Heights hasn’t generated much enthusiasm either.

And more news outlets talking about the film's premiere at the Venice Film Festival: Teen Now Magazine, Contact Music,

Variety informs of the line-up of the next Zurich Film Festival (September 22-October 2) which includes Wuthering Heights; the screening at the London Film Festival is scheduled for October 14.

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights