Sublime British filmmaking

Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights is featured today by a good many news outlets.

The Sheffield Telegraph focuses on the actors playing young Heathcliff and young Cathy:

Just before the film’s British premiere at the Leeds Film Festival last week, the Sheffield pair, who didn’t know each other beforehand but live quite close to each other, talked about their very first acting experience.
Shannon, from Shirecliffe, was 12 when the casting director paid a visit to Chaucer School looking for “feisty” types. She put herself forward and was asked to improvise a few scenes.
It was a similar story for Solomon Glave, who lives at Firth Park and goes to Holgate Meadows school. “I heard about the audition and just went for it,” he said.
“I’d never done any acting before. When I was younger I wanted to be an actor or a singer – I wanted to be famous – and now at 14 I have done it.
“People didn’t tell me what it was for, they just told me to act in a certain way. They wanted me to show a bit of anger. Four weeks later I heard that I was going to be in Wuthering Heights.”
He then went and got hold of a copy of the book but admits he hasn’t read it yet. Shannon has no intention of reading it. “I think it would ruin it for me.”
She has a point because the film is a provocatively radical new version of Emily Brontë’s much-loved novel by director Andrea Arnold whose most striking innovation is to make Heathcliff black to underline his “difference and strangeness” and explain why he is such an outsider. She chose people with no acting experience (which includes the older Heathcliff, James Howson) to be the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights to make it seem “raw and untamed and elemental”.
At Leeds producer Douglas Rae amplified this: “What you get is incredibly natural performances which you might not necessarily get with professional actors.
“It will surprise and shock audiences,” he agreed. “People always ask why we cast black actors for Heathcliff and one of the reasons was we wanted to get away from white middle-class actors who always seem to play him. They are usually too old for a start but really Ralph Fiennes or Laurence Olivier don’t convince as feral gipsies.” [...]
There’s a scene in which Heathcliff and Cathy playfully wrestle each other in the mud. What was that like, was it real mud? “Yes, of course, it was,” replied Shannon to what was evidently a daft question. “It was hard but it was also fun.”
What did she make of the character of Cathy? “She’s an outdoor girl and that’s what I’m like. I don’t like hanging around doing nothing.”
As Heathcliff Solomon had to endure some brutal treatment. “That was mostly from Hindley and I wasn’t bothered about being slapped around because it was acting. In real life I would have done something about it,” he laughed.

The Herald Scotland focuses on Kaya Scodelario:

A previous attempt to be an Austen heroine had not ended well. She went for the part of Emma in a television production and found herself in a long line of “beautiful, blonde, 26-year-old women who spoke perfectly”. There was Scodelario, brought up by her Brazilian immigrant mum in a London council flat, without drama school training. “I ran out before the audition, I was so scared.”
Arnold, fortunately, treats auditions differently. She takes a get-to-know-you approach, wanting to find out about the character of the actor as much as how they relate to the person they will be playing. In choosing Scodelario, Arnold got herself a young woman who, like Catherine Earnshaw, has backbone. (Alison Rowat)

It also reviews the film:

Though often beautiful in its harshness, and undeniably truer to the original than any of the other 16 screen incarnations, you may find Arnold’s picture one that’s easier to admire than to swoon over.

And The York Press has an article on Simone Jackson, who plays Nellie Dean:

A barmaid who was spotted by casting directors outside a pound shop in York has landed a starring role in a major new film.
Simone Jackson, of Lindley Road in Clifton, was approached outside Poundworld in Coney Street and invited to try for a part in the latest adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
After auditioning for Bafta-winning director Andrea Arnold, Simone landed the part of servant Nelly Dean. [...]
Former Canon Lee School pupil Simone, who was working at at Coopers Bar at York train station at the time of the audition and still works as a dance instructor, said she was carefully directed throughout filming so she always felt comfortable, but was allowed to improvise lines.
She said: “I am quite a confident person so I didn’t find it too difficult. I absolutely loved it. I never would have thought acting would be something I wanted to do.
“The best bit of it all was the people, they were brilliant. The director was awesome and she made me feel really comfortable.
“The film is completely different to how I expected it to be. It’s more art than anything else, it’s really gritty.”(Kate Liptrot)

The Birmingham Post reviews the film giving it 2 stars:

Emily Brontë’s 1847 gothic romance/horror reaches the silver screen again, with director Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank) attempting to prove that less script is more.
Unfortunately, in this instance, less is less.
As successive adaptations have proved, the novel’s complex themes have always been too much for the cinema to fully embrace compared with a mini-series, so stripping down the script to an almost skeletal state is not the obvious way to move forward. Where’s the dangerous passion and emotion which has kept the book alive down the generations for so long?
Spoken by a young, mostly untrained cast, the foul, racist language is probably not what most fans of the book want to hear as a homeless young black boy called Heathcliff (Solomon Glave) is taken in by Yorkshire hill farmer Mr Earnshaw (Paul Hilton). [...]
Sometimes resembling an amazingly bleak, Winter’s Bone-style western set on the moors, Arnold’s ultra-dark tones earned Robbie Ryan the Venice Film Festival cinematography prize in September.
But to cut the script, foul it up to 15 certificate level and then extend the natural cinema running time by half an hour represents a catalogue of mistakes from a director whose appetite for depicting cruelty at this level will have dog lovers in tears. (Graham Young)

And so do STV:

You want to cast aside any traditional conceptions of what a Wuthering Heights movie should resemble before watching this trailer for the new adaptation by Andrea Arnold. Stark and bleak, this looks about as far away from the period drama stereotype as you could possiblyimagine. Perhaps the most fun aspect of it will be watching nonplussed elderly folks stomping out of the cinema when they realise what they’ve let themselves in for. Something indicates that this won’t be an easy ride... (Michael MacLennan)

And The Bucks Herald:

Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of the classic novel is blistering, original, deeply moving and bold.
Wordless for long periods it relies on exquisite imagery, pacing and performance to tell this timeless tale of unrequited love and tragedy. It draws incredible performances from its young leads and even if it can’t sustain it and slides into sentiment it still astounds for the most part. Sublime British filmmaking. (Neil Fox)

Also reviewing the film are: The Struthers Review, Phil on Film, Dans Movie Insights, Centrefolds & Empty Screens.

The Guardian doesn't hesitate when it comes to choosing Yorkshire's greatest figure:

This Lancashire-rooted newspaper cannot claim to have a true stake in the [Yorkshire] Post's contest but, if asked, our vote would be cast for the most creative of all Yorkshire creatives – Emily Brontë.

The London Evening Standard picks BBC Films Christine Langan (involved in Jane Eyre 2011) as one of London's 1000 most influential people 2011 in Film. And The Telegraph and Argus has a letter concerning the notorious Changegate car park.

Jane Eyre 2011 is reviewed by One Movie at a Time and in Greek by Jourfixe and Film Boy. Stroke of Wing shares a few icons of this film. Confessions of a Book Lush reviews Wuthering Heights, the novel. Frisbee: A Book Journal has a post on Shirley. Geek Girl's Book Blog reviews April Lindner's Jane. Könyvek és Én writes in Hungarian about Sheila Kohlers Becoming Jane Eyre. And blogletteratura has a post in Italian about Jane Eyre. Una rilettura contemporanea.