Wuthering Heights

Bea says: Took myself off to see this for a Sunday matinee last week at our local cinema – the Station - as Cecil is seeing films on another continent at the moment.

Since I now live in North Yorkshire I thought this revisit of the Bronte classic would be appropriate (although strictly speaking the Brontes lived in West Yorkshire), and chose it instead of The Help. Notentirely sure I made the right decision there!

Well, it was certainly atmospheric, and earthy, with numerous rather long shots of the moon, heather, a flower, etc etc. Everyone looked very, very cold throughout, and everything was very, very muddy. Thelanguage was rather more coarse than I remember in the book, and there were some sex scenes I don’t recall either. But the aim I suspect the director (Andrea Arnold) had – of getting across the base nature of humanity – is achieved. Other than that I wasn’t overly impressed and rather suspect this film will vanish into oblivion.

The film covers only the first part of the book (rather a mistake I always think – it leaves the story hanging, without resolution), and is rather slow in pace – when 2 hours in Cathy stilled hadn’t died, I wondered if I should leave, as many others who had commenced the screening with me had done.

The acting was generally of a good standard; the styling annoyed me (I don’t think Cathy would have worn blue eyeshadow as a young girl, living as she did on a remote Yorkshire farmhouse in an era where only prostitutes and actresses wore makeup...in fact, and this may have been deliberate, the young Cathy looked like she’d stepped straight off a modern day street. At any moment I expected her to check her iphone.)

Arnold is rather the flavour of the month at the moment I gather, and this has achieved quite good reviews, and I guess is it is good to see a young director tackling this literary classic.

I never really liked this book, and find the character of Cathy very irritating, so don’t feel particularly precious about its interpretation – unfortunately I just felt this had been interpreted rather boringly (and it is going some to make the usually quite melodramatic Brontes boring!)

**