Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontës Sturmhöhe

Saw this at the Venice film festival last week. It had quite a few walk outs near the beginning (probably the strong Yorkshire accents with lots of background noise made it unintelligible for non native English speakers) and they were the lucky ones as it certainly did not improve over the following 2 hours.

The director's main aim seemed to be to try and shock audiences who thought they were coming to an Emma Thompson type costume drama by making the film as morose as possible and throwing in lots of swearing, violence and a bit of necrophilia. Unfortunately the only shocking thing was that they had managed to make such a bad film out of a classic novel.

There were numerous petty things which annoyed me about this film, e.g. the use of pathetic fallacy with the weather is way over the top (the Earnshaws live under a constant biblical downpour whereas there rich neighbours in the next door valley have a climate from a fruit juice advert); the cameraman either had Parkinson's or had been previously employed in one of those American police series where reality is represented by a constantly jerky camera; the actors playing the adult Cathy and Heathcliff look nothing like their younger selves - Heathcliff even appears to have changed race!; would a 19th century strict Christian father be happy with someone sleeping with his teenage daughter in the house?; would a 19th century Heathcliff be able to swan around Edgar house willy nilly? I could go on.

Most importantly I think the director fails completely in making us feel any sympathy for her characters. Heathcliff has a hard time of it in his youth but has no redeeming features. It's not helped by the fact that the actor playing the adult Heathcliff is atrociously bad at his job.

I have no problem with making Wuthering Heights dark and brooding but make it a bit less daft.

My experience was so drastically opposed to what I'd heard about this film in the newspapers that I was going to write a shocked review here; but I see that it has already all been said. Wilfully obscure narrative (I went with someone who had never read the book and had to explain to him afterwards who was who and what had happened, and why), self-indulgent overuse of wildlife shots and arty camera angles (once is good; twice is good; ALL THE TIME is tedious), important plot developments whisked over in the joints between one scene and the next, poor performances from the adult actors, jerky camera-work, insufficient lighting, and a variety of deliberately repulsive scenes of slaughter, necrophilia, blood-sucking and copulation in the mud (and I'm not talking about that bizarre bog scene between Cathy and Heathcliff, clearly intended to be very significant since it was repeated at the end...)

A lot of the time I felt I was being battered over the head with the director's insistence that This Is a Very Important Metaphor but simply didn't understand what the shot of a beetle, or a horse's flank, or a patch of stone, or yet another rainstorm, was supposed to be saying. (The one thing I didn't notice, interestingly, was that the film is in Academy ratio rather than widescreen - probably because the vast majority of the pictures I watch are not in widescreen and in fact I generally dislike it, so I certainly wasn't conscious of that as a drawback.) To be fair, my other companion, who adores the novel, thought the film was the closest she'd ever seen to capturing the spirit of the book, although she too was somewhat disappointed in the 'adult' section.

I suppose you could say that it was a disquieting film of a disquieting book, in which none of the characters were sympathetic because none of the characters in the original are sympathetic: for my part I found myself roused to a furious dislike and resentment, so was at least not indifferent to it. I didn't walk out of what was a sparsely-attended screening -- I didn't even allow myself to disturb my neighbours by looking at my watch -- but I fantasised about being able to leave and was longing for the experience to end.

I think the film has power, which is why I haven't marked it lower than I have. I also think that in many ways it is a bad piece of film-making, more akin to a pretentious video installation than the telling of a complicated and violent story.

The wind really does 'wuther' like that in Yorkshire, though...

Although I will be aiming to judge Wuthering Heights on its own terms, I can't help sharing other reviewers' disappointment of this film. The book is bleak but wonderful, and I honestly find the characters and story much more compelling there than there.

Wuthering Heights(2011) isn't terrible as such. The scenery is stunning, likewise the costumes are quite good, the sound is very authentic and I liked the fact that the soundtrack is kept at minimal apart from at the end. The child counterparts of Cathy and Heathcliff are also truly excellent, especially Solomon Glave as a subdued and ferocious Heathcliff. Shannon Beer as young Cathy is just as striking. James Northcote is pretty effective as well, and Wuthering Heights does deserve credit for conveying a believable enough atmosphere especially at the start.

However, I didn't like the photography mostly. There are some nice shots here and there, but the hand-held camera work distracts from the bleakness of the story and seems too avant garde for a period piece for me. It may have worked in Red Road and Fish Tank, but it didn't here. The adult leads are not as good as the children, James Howson doesn't have enough of the characteristics that Glave brought and consequently he's bland. The fact that Glave and Howson don't look much alike takes away from the authenticity, and to me there is a lack of chemistry between Howson and Kaya Scodelario(who fares better, but Beer interested me more).

The script is very stilted. Just for the record, I wasn't expecting a letter-for-letter adaptation, and in all honesty there are not very many of those out there, but I don't think I was expecting dialogue that didn't flow very well from one line to the next or lines that came across as anachronistic. The story also disappoints. Granted the story of Wuthering Heights is a bleak and very difficult one to translate to screen, but in the translation here there is no passion, a lack of integrity in the ending, the way the story is told is too fractured in that the first half is better than the second by some considerable distance and the animal cruelty scenes were unnecessary and hard to watch.

Pacing is also an issue, the second half feels sluggish and I don't think the lack of chemistry helped nor with the lack of any likable or interesting characters, the support cast are much like caricatures as the film strips them of being any more memorable to make an effort to focus on the leads while ignoring the statuses and attitudes of the time, or ones to genuinely empathise with, they are too dull and underdeveloped to make me do that. Lastly, Mumford and Sons is a great song, but out of place here.

Overall, not a terrible film but a disappointing one. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Yes, it's very slow, but that's not the core of the problem: the heart of the problem is that there is no heart. I cannot relate to anyone in the film. I wanted to cheer on Heathcliff, but it soon becomes apparent why that's incredibly difficult to do. The characters are mostly just boorish and disgusting.

Hareton disturbed me the most in this film based on Wuthering Heights. Dour before his time, he appears now and then in the early scenes, a dirty blonde-haired urchin, to gawp at visitors, or to witness violent abuse from the sidelines. In the final scene, he is seen hanging up dogs by their collars. The depiction of Hareton is related to the 'cruelty breeds cruelty' message in Andrea Arnold's film – and in Emily Brontë's novel, if that can be seen, glibly, as a straight deliverer of messages. Considerable respect has been shown to the original: a fair amount of thought and research seems to have gone into finding out what was in Emily Brontë's mind and how she saw her characters, and into the late eighteenth century in Yorkshire. All the artefacts – stoneware jars, spades for digging out peat and so on – look as if they have been borrowed from a folk museum, the costumes appear to be authentic, and Heathcliff is black. All perfectly credible.

The unknown James Howson from Leeds was cast as the adult Heathcliff, with the equally unknown Solomon Glave as his young version. We do not find out which language he speaks when he first arrives, because there is very little speaking in the whole film. It is not dialogue- free, employing a few sentences and phrases from the novel, rather like the quotes a candidate might fish out for an A-level essay, with more of them in the film's second half, after Heathcliff's return, than in the first. At other times, the words which the characters use seem to have grown from improvisation sessions, giving the action a kind of Ken Loach feel at times. To leave out most of Emily Brontë's beautiful prose – and the second half of her story, as usual – are bold moves which a few literary folk might find outrageous. I can fully understand the opinions of those who might describe the film as 'coarse and disagreeable', but then the structure of the novel does not match the needs of the cinema. Unlike Cary Fukunaga, who retained as many of Charlotte's words as possible in his Jane Eyre, Andrea Arnold has gone in an opposite direction, because she has decided not to bother with conventional costume dramas.

This Wuthering Heights relies on cinematography, the impact of fresh and young actors (eat your heart out, Stanislavski), an authentic period feel and a powerful, often startling harshness. Arnold has said that she "had to pick out the things that had resonance to me" and that she wanted to give the children plenty of time at the beginning.

This was a good move, because the children are by far the most interesting. Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer have "not acted before", but manage to be fascinating, holding everything together for an hour. Full marks to Arnold there. The story is told through sounds and sights: we see the boy's amazement and disorientation when he arrives, Cathy's warm smile – the only warmth – a feather brushing a cheek, his hand on the horse's rump when he rides behind her, his smelling of her hair, the weals on his back after a beating by Joseph, her mouth as she licks the blood from them, their crude and muddy sexual fumbling out on the moors. Sensual imagery with a vengeance! Raw teenage emotion in our faces! And I loved Shannon Beer's charming rendition of Barbara Allen. She's a proper wild, wicked slip of a girl.

Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan won the Golden Osella Award at the last Venice Film Festival for Best Cinematography, deservedly. His low shots through clumps of sedge and his panoramas of the moors (filming took place on the bleaker areas around Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales) are stunning, but what is especially memorable is his selection of close-ups of the insects, flowers and small creatures to be found in the heather and under the bilberries. I was looking out for harebells, but did not notice any. Perhaps they were the wrong kind of flower here. The wind sounded right – I recognise that wind – as it battered the microphone relentlessly.

The creatures of the wild moors a couple of centuries ago have a strong present-times feel, because casting in this way has put racial prejudice in the forefront. Heathcliff is full of revengeful passions because he has been racially abused. The violent skinhead Hindley (Lee Shaw) is notably foul-mouthed when he does speak, like an adherent of some far-right organisation, and the enforced baptism scene shows that the church was pretty short on tender loving care when it came to new dark-skinned members of the congregation. The West Yorkshire accents are just right.

In the second half, the adult Heathcliff (James Howson) does not spend long on relishing his revenge on Hindley, but that is not the only disappointment. Both James Howson and Kaya Scodelario, who plays the adult Cathy, bear only token resemblances to their child counterparts, and have less presence. Cathy is not differentiated from Isabella enough, and seems to be unrelated to her younger self, which can not be explained away by her presence in the sophistication of Thrushcross Grange, where manners (and the mild weather) are always better. Heathcliff seems somehow clumsier and less sympathetic, a fact which is not helped by James Howson's lack of acting experience (more forgivable in Solomon Glave), and the shots of flowers and insects which sustained the first half become less effective because they are repeated too much. James Northcote's acting as Edgar is faultless, but seems out of place here, as if he has stepped out of another film.

And that other film could be the 1939 version, which is at the other end of the spectrum.