By the time you actually see Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, if you wind up committing that mad act, you might be surprised at how you’ve exhausted the strength of your scorn on the previews. They played relentlessly for months before the film’s premiere and were so stupendously silly that, if you’d read Emily Brontë’s novel, you discovered how high your eyebrows could actually rise on your forehead in registering poleaxed disapproval.
But it’s hard to keep that kind of raging disdain going. A weary cynicism overtakes it that is the only way to cope with the Emerald Fennells of the world.
At age forty, she has the sensibility of a horny, giggling fourteen-year-old, so her Wuthering Heights is exactly what such a case of arrested development would produce. Fennell’s on record as wanting to honor her first titillated reading of the novel at age fourteen. So hotties Heathcliff and Cathy, when not stiffly playing dress-up in a series of absurd costumes meant to represent old-timey people of no specific period, shag their way across the moors to the tunes of Charli XCX.
It’s not that the period erotic appeal of Wuthering Heights isn’t commonly acknowledged. In an episode of The Simpsons, for example, when the family finds themselves in a survivalist TV reality show placing them in the recreated year of 1895, Homer assesses Marge’s interest in sex that night by suggesting, “Maybe I could wuther your heights?”
But that represents the apex of sophistication compared to Fennell’s approach.
Her idea of a great film opening is to start with the sound of rhythmic panting and grunting on the soundtrack, and just when you’re convinced you’re about to see an enthusiastic act of copulation, she gives us a first shot of a man being hanged, strangling and kicking at the end of a rope. The eager mob watching this grisly spectacle, including the child Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) and her paid companion, young Nelly Dean (Hong Chau), are…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
