Wuthering shites

The additional sub-take that no one needed and this isn't just about the film.

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie at one of the splashy premiers for “Wuthering Heights”, a film by Emerald Fennell.

It didn’t make sense. Any of it.

I have no skin in the novel game. I haven’t read it since I was a teen and I didn’t have a lot of love for it then. I had already been sorted into the Jane Eyre sub-category and you can’t be both.

So, I went to watch the film because simply everyone is talking about it, the marketing machine having pushed me up against a wall and stuck its tongue in my ear.

Let’s start right at the top.

My history with Emerald Fennell films:

1. When I saw Promising Young Woman it hit me right between the eyes and I thought Fennell was an angry genius. I wanted whatever she was selling from then on. Boy did she have something to say and a demonstrably cool way of saying it that seemed to speak directly to me.

2. When I saw Saltburn, I was confused. I must have missed her point this time among the insane Brideshead pop promo that was jizzed onto my eyeballs. It’s about class, but what she thinks about class is unclear and informed, obviously, by the strange class bubble she herself comes from. In fact, what she seems to think about class is that despite everyone, top to bottom, being just awful, the upper classes really have to watch out for the middle classes who are definitely after their foie gras.

3. In the years since Saltburn, watching interviews with her, keenly inspecting them for that fury present in PYW, I now think she made that brilliant film by accident. Like, the point that the only way women can win in a patriarchy is to become weaponised victims because we cannot defeat the status quo, was just the accidental result of some cool visuals she wanted to try. I don’t know. I’ve given up analysing anything she does now because it would be like measuring the depth of a water droplet with a metre rule.

So, to the most recent film. The one that drips money and white privilege but god, you guys, stop going on about it and taking it so seriously. It’s just a horny treat for Valentine’s. Heart emoji heart emoji dagger.

Fennell’s films have become the sensory equivalent of flooding the zone. She bombards you with so much stuff - anachronistic costume, music, fog, MONTAGE, flourescent sunsets - that assessing the finished thing is like trying to remember your phone number while trapped in a spin cycle.

But let’s start with the casting. Hollywood casting - your exec producer wants to play Cathy and you have a great relationship with the hot Hollywood man of the hour - is no mystery. Those two names above the title mean this film’s audience is buying a ticket. We can’t change that.

But the film (let's take it as red/read that the “film” is not the book) describes an intense childhood friendship/siblinghood that turns horny AT SOME POINT. I use capitals here to emphasise that the leads are depicted as children, then 35-year-olds, with nothing in between.

Logic (and the novel) says their hormones kicked in as teenagers and their gennies began to twitch for each other around then. They did not live together far into (in this film’s chronology) at least their twenties, before the squelchy stirrings made themselves evident. So, that’s annoying and breaks the timeline, my concentration or any emotional through-line for me.

Now to the direction. In interviews I’ve seen, there is much talk of the director trusting her actors. Oh Jacob just automatically shielded Margot’s eyes when the rain machines started up, so they kept it in because it made star and director go weak at the knees.

If they want an antidote to this, they need only watch the irksome clip of Elordi spitting gum into his mom’s hand during a red carpet event. It worked for me.

But the point: a director who trusts their actors still needs an iron hand on the tiller so the film doesn’t just become a mish-mash of different people’s in-the-moment instincts. I’m glad Fennell is a dream to work with. So few in showbiz truly are. But the films she makes are confused and confusing, I suspect because there is no singular vision beyond, “it looks cool”.

Isabella writes a desperate plea to Nelly, begging for rescue from her brutish husband. But we have already seen her, before and after the letter, winking and smirking and loving her time as a dog chained in the fireplace. We do need to know who these people are and what they want. You can’t have every single character be a capricious willow the wisp. It’s annoying and monotonous and not grounded in truth.

Is Linton a quite nice cuckold or a bossy bastard? He keeps changing his mind? Is Heathcliff a chivalrous, brooding hunk or an abuser who uses brutality as escapism, because he changes his mind a lot during this film. Like I say, you could be trying to work it out forever. No one on that set has the answers.

The plastic curtains.

They get a whole section of their own. When the Lintons show Cathy her new dressing room, closets filled with silks and brocades from Paris etc, the pillars around the room are all draped in clear plastic curtains.

The aesthetic has already been buggered about by latex crinolines, skin wallpaper and massive tittage during a funeral scene. It’s not like I’m expecting period authenticity. But a prize for anyone who can convince me that there was any point at all to the plastic curtains. Go on, I’ll wait. I’ll even open the comments up.

Would I say this about a film made by a man?

Yes, I very much would. Fennell is a man at this point: someone who is allowed to make whatever she wants as long as it’s visually wild and simply crammed with hot famouses. Someone so happy in her own skin, she cheerfully wonders why you’re insisting on scaffolding and foundations when the building is just… lovely?

I feel like I’ve watched a film made by Boris Johnson, but not evil. Friends who have met Emerald Fennel (I’ve only just found out it’s pronounced F’n-NELL) tell me how absolutely lovely she is and I believe them. I bet I’d like her and ever so slightly want her to like me.

But she’d see it in my eyes now. The liquid rage.

And the fury, as I discussed with my husband on the drive home from the cinema, isn’t necessarily just coming from the film or even Fennell. My next therapy session is going to be, if not particularly full of actual content, beautifully lit and flooded with artificial rain.

Thank you for listening. One star.