‘They won’t make me hate it.’
That’s what a fellow female film critic said to me ahead of Wuthering Heights’ release in cinemas today, when discussing the haters we had seen on social media.
The online discourse had been rumbling over the past week with many people already declaring their strident opinions, before it was even out.
But I was determined to enjoy it. I went, as the director Emerald Fennell promised, a bit ‘feral’ for the adaptation, and don’t care if that made me seem basic.
Another female film pal admitted to me: ‘I just want to watch Jacob Elordi put his hands in Margot Robbie’s mouth for two hours in the rain.’ And I agree.
But as the review embargo lifted it became clear that yes, predictably, some of the Emily Brontë purists were unhappy that it didn’t align exactly with the book.
However, many of us were actually fine with Emerald Fennell’s supposed ‘desecration’ of a classic, multi-layered novel – because in distilling it down to its base, primal instincts, she made it exactly what women currently need.
It’s pretty, it’s hot, it is toxic – and it’s not that deep. And that’s okay!
I’ve seen a male influencer declare that ‘whatever this movie was trying to sell me, I’m not buying it’ – and that’s no problem because it’s not for him: it’s very much for the girls.
I do, however, agree with the critique around the controversy of Fennell’s casting of Elordi as Heathcliff, essentially whitewashing the character – it was a sticking point for me too.
It is vanishingly rare to have a nineteenth-century British novel more than suggest that its male lead is a person of colour, with reference to him as a ‘dark-skinned gipsy’.
And for such a revisionist take on Brontë’s text, Fennell using a white actor does feel like a missed opportunity.
But for Fennell, seeing Elordi on on the set of her 2023 film Saltburn was enough to cast him as Heathcliff – because he looked so similar to the Heathcliff on the cover of her novel version of Wuthering Heights.
She has said repeatedly that the film is her interpretation of the book that she remembered reading at 14. And it seems she meant it literally too.
But, let’s be real here too, he’s a hot actor – both in the looks department and because he’s of the moment.
But there’s also a lot of Fennell trashing too – as a so-called Marmite filmmaker – because of the bold swings she’s made with her interpretation of the story.
Only half the novel has been adapted (although it’s not the first screen version to do that), major characters have been removed like Cathy’s brother Hindley, Heathcliff’s chief tormentor, and the costumes include period inappropriate latex-style material and a translucent nightgown. It’s all very outlandish – but glamorous.
But the main sticking point really seems to be the sex. There isn’t any suggested in the novel, whereas here we’ve got two montages, as well as masturbation and a steamy stable scene complete with a crop and a bridle.
I don’t have strong feelings towards Emily Brontë, so I don’t have that connection to the text others do. But as a critic, I always appreciate seeing something that hasn’t been done before, and while there have been many previous adaptations – there are none quite as horny.
And it’s rare that the female demographic is considered in this way by movies – although Babygirl, The Idea of You and Challengers have given it a good go recently.
Yes, Fennell has removed a chunk of Wuthering Heights’ nuance and stunted long-standing discourse through its casting, as well as softened awful characters to hit the yearning as hard as possible
In the book, for example, Heathcliff is much worse, at one point killing his wife’s puppy.
But it was always clear this would be a loose interpretation.
When you see quotation marks around the title and a Charli XCX soundtrack, you can’t say you weren’t warned.
Some of the criticism over the sexification of Wuthering Heights smacks a bit of intellectual snobbery too, like we ought to be ashamed of enjoying it.
In a one-star review, Clarisse Loughrey of The Independent compared the film to ‘a limp Mills & Boon’ while The Guardian’s two-star review sae critic Peter Bradshaw describe it as ‘a 20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds and a saucy slap of BDSM’.
I’ve also seen Fennell described as ‘to film what Colleen Hoover is to literature’, which has all the shades of judgement attached you can imagine.
One commenter on social media called my positive reaction into question by saying: ‘If you’re an English literature student it’s appalling.’
Well I’ve actually got an English literature degree, so feel pretty qualified to disagree.
Nonetheless, we should not be policing who gets to say what about films and how much weight that should hold.
These sexist criticisms against Wuthering Heights go to show that films tend to be made for men, and none of them get near this level of scrutiny – whether they are intellectually devoid or horny.
Jason Statham gets to punch, kick and bullet spray his way through yet another action film made mainly for blokes without people getting their knickers into a twist.
And the gaze of men has long been the considered audience for mainstream cinematic sex scenes. Quentin Tarantino gets to act out boyish sex fantasies in his films, and I don’t know many women who enjoy Basic Instinct’s leg uncrossing scene as much as their male counterparts – not least because Sharon Stone has been vocal about being misled on set during the filming of it.
But in Wuthering Heights, there were no egg yolks, balls of dough or Jacob Elordis harmed in the making.
Fennell is inviting the girls to her kinky and slightly unhinged party.
And I had a great time.
The world is on fire, just let us enjoy pretty, if problematic, things.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk.
Share your views in the comments below.
from Metro https://ift.tt/4aLKj0E
via IFTTT
0 comments: