Wuthering Heights (dir. Andrea Arnold, 2011)
Where to begin? It never gets old. There are as many interpretations of its story, subtext and symbolism as there are versions - movies, plays, poems, novels, stories, paintings, biographical studies, literary analyses. Here the setting is the key: this is England. Andrea Arnold creates an utterly realistic picture of Yorkshire: it’s a film moulded in mud and musk, dried leaves, pelting rain, blinding fogs, wind-swept heather, restless rocks. The colour palette is all brown and green, occasionally tinted with the colour of rancid milk. It’s not the pastoral Yorkshire we have come to picture through Romantic words, no Lake-District-travel-brochure green dotted by bright daffodils or sheep, no place for ”emotions recollected in tranquillity”. Everything here is turmoil and tumult - the earth friable and unsteady, the sky ready to open and fall down. It’s Yorkshire as I remember it from visiting in the early winter.
But of course realism is not the only key. The landscape is charged with something that exceeds faithfulness to a location, something that’s not mere filmic symbolism but rather supernatural significance. In this sense, Arnold’s film is much more true to the Romantic imagination than previous versions, but the effect of such construction of landscape is far from sublime, more repulsive. The place is possessed with a portentous Tarkovskian memory, a parchment torched with past abuse and trauma - the flaming hot cheeks of a boy slapped hard, the scabby scars a girl picks and licks. Violence returns unquenched by time and education, unwieldy passion seeks and destroys.
Heathcliff is black - black of heart and black of skin. Although I must confess I have never seen it done before, this is not a particularly new idea: literary criticism has been pondering the provenance and identity of Heathcliff for years now - Irish foundling? Abandoned gypsy baby? Abducted slave? What is striking is that despite this casting choice, the obvious moral meditations about race and racism that would follow do not cross the threshold of this world. Heathcliff’s treatment at the hands of piggish, racist Hindley is cringe-worthy and horrible, but fortunately Arnold feels no need to hammer the point home.
However, Arnold’s films are never generically straightforward or politically naive: Fish Tank was a terrific exercise in disguising dystopian fiction as social realism, and Wuthering Heights is social realism masked as period drama. Wuthering Heights’ England speaks of today’s England, quite literally by speaking the same language of cunts and fucks and bastards and okays heard all over England’s green and pleasant land. The effect of twenty-first century speech delivered in breeches and corsets is at the same time disruptive and utterly beguiling, and it carries Arnold’s political statement: Heathcliff’s voice - just as much as Hindley’s - is the voice of those rioters who set England ablaze earlier this summer - a class despised by the elite, neglected, and abused, for whom violence becomes the only language.
But the politics don’t get in the way of the heart of the story. As much as Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights burns with the fire and brimstone of teenage, a time of incomprehension and confusion, the inability to read the signs of adulthood while the body speaks a language mysterious and compelling. Desire. Sex. Rage.
The compulsion of violence pervades humans and nature alike: the wind lashes the moors as much as women’s hair and men’s coats; animals die senselessly and get murdered without pity. And yet this raw, brutal, harsh world, is not without poetry; only it’s more Ted Hughes than Wordsworth - both Northern men, one tragic and the other solemn.
My only criticism is that, unfortunately, Arnold also seems to suffer from the latest ailment of contemporary directors: the inability to end the film where it should. A good twenty minutes of this could be compressed into five, and the closing three minutes - where, alas, after an impressive and rigorous approach to soundtrack restricted the use of extradiegetic music, a modern song bursts in - produce a crass, disruptive effect. I hated the ending, and I am sorry for it: it sent up an extraordinary film with a cheap shot. I hope I will forget it happened.
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