Spring is late this year. We had snow last week.
The Glenshane Pass was closed. A farmer in
Larne lost sheep. He was able to save two lambs
Lucky and Snowy. This was a hope story.
Spring has not come until the camillia bush
in my garden flowers. A little bit of pink was
poking out this morning.
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Wuthering Heights, the latest Brontë adaptation was directed by Andrea Arnold and premiered at Venice Film Festival in 2011. Arnold’s first film, Red Road won the Jury Prize in Cannes 2006, and Fish Tank, won the same award in Cannes, 2009. Kaya Rose Scodelario plays the adult Cathy Earnshaw, while James Howson plays the adult Heathcliff. Shannon Beer stars as Catherine Earnshaw junior and Solomon Glave as Heathcliff junior.
ReplyDeleteIn Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw’s foster brother, a foundling from the streets of Liverpool, forms a close bond with her. When Cathy grows up she marries the foppish Edgar Linton for money and security and rejects the feral Heathcliff. Although as she admits to Nellie, the housekeeper “I am Heathcliff—he's always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself— but as my own being—so, don't talk of our separation again—it is impracticable.” But a separation takes place, and Heathcliff wreaks a revenge that is out all proportion to the deed, and continues his snarling malevolence into the next generation.
It is a very apt that this film is shown in Belfast, a mere thirty three miles from Rathfriland, the homeland of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, father of the famous Emily Brontë, who penned Wuthering Heights in 1847. In fact one of the Brontë descendents, Carol Katherine Brontë still lives in County Down, and has completed research and gives talks on the famous family and Patrick’s early life in Ireland. Emily Brontë’s book was greeted with a mixture of criticism and disapproval and one paper described it as a ‘strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism.’
From the opening scene of the film as the adult Heathcliff lies writhing below the ghostly lattice window, we enter a strange sort of world, where in Virginia Woolf words, ‘all that we know of human beings are torn up and are replaced by spirits that transcend reality.’ We have no need for facts for as Woolf argues, Emily Brontë ‘with a few touches could indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.’ Like Cathy’s prescient dream we are thrown out of heaven for a period of two hours, for we do not belong there as we journey through the hellish, but exhilarating landscapes, which is the backdrop of the early lives of Heathcliff and the wild and passionate Cathy.
The film concentrates on the early lives of the doomed couple as they ride and romp across the elemental moors. The viewer enters this almost nightmarish landscape with its harriers looming menacingly overhead and hounds constantly barking and although to paraphrase Cathy’s words, it kills us, but we thrive on it. Now and then we are given a close up of a rotten apple, an unkempt child, a rabbit being strangled, or lamb being slaughtered or a child being whipped until he bleeds, as the rain pelts down and the wind blows across the wild and desolate moors. We are assured that no animals were hurt in the making of this film! There is no need for a soundtrack as we are spellbound by the howling wind, the thunder, the barking hounds and the church bells and the lashing rain.
In the end we may reverse Cathy’s words, ‘let me in’ to ‘let me out’! Andrea Arnold certainly makes the wind blow and the thunder roll in this film and we look forward to her next project.
And to boot, Queen’s Film Theatre are celebrating the release of Wuthering Heights, by teaming up with leading leisure airline Jet2.com and Haworth's only five star and silver awarded B&B, Ashmount Country House to give one lucky couple the opportunity to immerse themselves in the lives of Cathy and Heathcliff!
Brenda Liddy, Film Journalism student, Blick Studios
Brenda Liddy © 2011