Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold)

[B-side]

IMDb

[B-side]

Arnold's Wuthering Heights features what is probably the best rural location shooting since Malick filmed the wheat fields of Canada for Days of Heaven. The film is a dark, intimate romantic drama that paints outside the margins of period romance featuring sado-masochistic sexual overtones dipping into near-vampirism. Above all else, it's a feverish sensorial experience. Arnold's attention to detail is brilliant. A fantastic film.

[kopello]

Did this and Deep Blue Sea leak?

[soitgoes...]

Did this and Deep Blue Sea leak?

Both screeners leaked.

[Adam]

Have you seen Red Road or Fish Tank, B-Side?

[B-side]

Have you seen Red Road or Fish Tank, B-Side?

Not yet. I've heard less than enthusiastic things.

[Adam]

Ehh, Red Road is worth a look and I liked Fish Tank a lot. It got slapped with the Loach-lite, standard Brit miserablist tag early on, but it had a lot more going for it imo. Fassbender was great and the film really works as a specific and tender view of adolescent female sexuality. Quite a few moments have stuck since I last watched it like a year and a half ago

[Ezee E]

Fish Tank is very good.

[B-side]

Ehh, Red Road is worth a look and I liked Fish Tank a lot. It got slapped with the Loach-lite, standard Brit miserablist tag early on, but it had a lot more going for it imo. Fassbender was great and the film really works as a specific and tender view of adolescent female sexuality. Quite a few moments have stuck since I last watched it like a year and a half ago

I have a soft spot for films exploring adolescent sexuality. I'll definitely check them out sooner or later.

[Adam]

I have a soft spot for films exploring adolescent sexuality.

I have a hard spot for films exploring adolescent sexuality

#drunk3AMmessageboardposts

[B-side]

I have a hard spot for films exploring adolescent sexuality

#drunk3AMmessageboardposts

:lol:

[dreamdead]

This was quite affecting; Arnold's use of such adolescent actors really embraces the pathos present throughout the narrative, and the way she depicts Heathcliff's abuse resonates so powerfully. Some of the scenes between younger Catherine and Heathcliff contain such raw sexuality that it's almost blissful, suggesting so well how their attraction could ruin a whole family's tradition. Likewise, as Brightside notes, the location shooting really transforms this into a convincing portrait of lower-class degradation. The earthiness of the style is altogether convincing.

I found myself less interested in adult Catherine, though, who remains much more of a sketch than I think Arnold means to present. The rage and abandon that the adult Heathcliff articulates never finds reciprocity in the adult actress, who seems more petulant than devoted, more narcissistic than accepting. Arnold's adaptation also seems to become more conventional in the last twenty or so minutes, so that the transformation of the Bronte novel that was woven through so much of the early parts of the film lose some of their verve.

Powerful stuff overall, though. I am quite convinced by the explicit racism that Heathcliff gets in this version, and the child actor for him is exceptional.

[EyesWideOpen]

This had some great teenage acting and the location were amazing but something about the whole thing didn't really connect with me. It's definitely the weaker of the three Arnold films I've seen.

[Melville]

It's an interesting take on the book's narrative. The book looks into the story from the outside, through several layers of narrators. And strikingly, it never gets to the core: the young Heathcliff and Cathy's time together in their youth out on the moors, which is the foundation for their deathless bond and which conflates the heather-covered hills with Heaven in their minds, is never described, only ever alluded to; it's something that most of the narrative looks back at, but which the reader never sees except through a glimpse in a diary and what's inferred from Heathcliff and Cathy's few lengthy monologues. Those monologues hence form the emotional skeleton on which the rest of the story hangs.

The movie takes exactly the opposite approach, focusing much of its time on the young characters' time in and around the rugged hills and mud. All the monologues are cut, replaced with a bare minimum of dialogue, leaving the landscape to do most of the work. It's a nice use of the location and raw, tactile cinematography.

But the allusive style and weak performances from the adult actors don't really capture the characters, and they leave the narrative feeling muddled. Maybe the biggest problem is that adult Heathcliff is miscast. He's always looking thoughtful and sad rather than burning with hate, resentment, and malice, which makes his vengeance feel diffused: there's no sense of revenge in him marrying his enemy's sister, because his motivations for doing so aren't really made clear, and there's no sense of revenge in his taking over his other enemy's property, because that plotline is only vaguely alluded to before the very end. There's also no real feeling of passion between the adult Heathcliff and Cathy. That might be due to the adult Cathy being so poorly fleshed out, largely because her delirious monologue isn't featured in the film.

It's also kind of awkward that the movie makes Heathcliff so much less malicious and sadistic than in the book. Considering that the movie's take on the story was to put the cycle of abuse and violence at its center (to the point of giving the children a totally different relationship with the father than that in the book), rather than the romance as in most adaptations, showing more of Heathcliff's sadism in the latter half of the movie would have made sense.

[Rowland]

A most pleasant surprise, I kinda loved this. Hopefully more of us will soon have access to it, or at the very least seek it out through other means.