"If you wanna watch a documentary about the Brontës, there are loads and they're great. But this is a story and an interpretation," Mackey told Harper's Bazaar. "You just kind of have to roll with it."
Asked about the timeline differences between Brontë's real life and "Emily," Mackey was blunt: "Yeah, but, like, who cares? I get it. I mean, I was the same in the beginning, but in the end, it's, like, 'It's just a story. Can we all just get over ourselves?' The problem is if it was ever pitched and sold as a biopic, that would be the problem ... You just kind of have to roll with it and let it happen to you and just enjoy it in all of its imperfections and all the different rhythms and all of the broad strokes. You need to just follow it. That's the way you can enjoy it."
Mackey ultimately said that the way that she and O'Connor told the story of the "Wuthering Heights" author — whose sisters Charlotte and Anne were also famous writers, penning "Jane Eyre" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," respectively — really worked for her, despite that it took liberties here and there. One particular potential liberty is the film's "mask scene," where, while sitting with her sisters and a few male companions, she dons a strange ceramic mask as they all play a game... but when Emily says that she's possessed by the spirit of her late mother, the windows slam shut, scaring everybody. It's a strange little addition, but works in the context of the movie, and Mackey says it marks the sea change in the film overall.
"The end result I'm quite happy with," Mackey said. "It feels like it's not stuck in a specific structure or a specific kind of filmic rule system, which I like. I like that we pretty quickly, from the mask scene onwards, blur those boundaries quite intensely and play with the genre a little bit, go towards the more the supernatural side." The film definitely takes on a supernatural bent in this scene, and clearly, Mackey felt good about this direction. (Nina Starner)
In the afternoon, back on the veranda and having tea, I thought of the Jean Rhys novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. I remembered the husband—the Mr Rochester of Jane Eyre infamy—and how deeply intimidated he was by the lushness of the rainforest around him. He had come to the Caribbean a second son, the victim of primogeniture and feeling very sorry for himself.
His self-pity makes him cruel, especially to Antoinette, the French Creole girl he marries for her money. They go deep into the countryside for their honeymoon. The landscape is untameable and irresistible, as he finds his wife on the long, dark nights they share in the aftermath of their marriage. Every night he listens to rainfall of which he can find no sign in the morning. Every sunset he waits to catch the scent of flowers that bloom only in the evening. The passion he feels for his bride is as transient as these other pleasures—it disappears like vapour with the daylight and it is like it never was.
His wife is not a proper English wife and the trees and the flowers and the animals are not like those back home. He finds the forest as hostile as it is beautiful and, like all things strange and unknown, must be conquered. His wife, too, must be subjugated, her strange attraction broken so that he maintains control. He renames her Bertha and thus begins the erasure of her self-identity, which she never recovers. (Suszanna Clarke)
0 comments:
Post a Comment