Director Emerald Fennell’s high design take of English literature’s greatest gothic love story goes too far in one way and not far enough in another.
That is to say in this latest of many a screen adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel in which the obsessive relationship at its core is famously unconsummated, there is enough bonking going on to make the casual observer think he was watching one of those period parodies of the kind that made Flesh (not Flash) Gordon in the 1970s.
True, there is the first two thirds of the film during which Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff and Margot Robbie’s Cathy sail through childhood and puberty – he was adopted, she was neglected – without hormones getting in the way too much. But after Cathy escapes the stone cold country pile of Wuthering Heights and also the misrule of her alcoholic father (a superbly disgusting Martin Clunes who may find this film heralds a Richard E. Grant-like boost to his film career), she and Heathcliff have a whole montage devoted to having sex in every possible location - and position. They do it in her bedroom, on the moor, in a carriage, at Wuthering Heights – where of course they bonded as children – and all the way back again.
All this replaces not so much what you would call abstinence in the book, more absence. Placing quotation marks around the title is presumably meant to allow such licence. Yet if Fennell’s intention was to liberate the film from being shackled to the original, the point is lost as the new version never feels as daring as the old.
Where Elordi’s Tarzan-like beefcake cuddles the body of his (spoiler alert) dead soulmate Cathy, Bronté’s version has him throwing himself onto the grave and clawing at the earth to exhume her. Nothing here feels any where near as shocking.
Robbie never stops looking like the A-lister she is. And with a rocking score by Charlie XCX and a somewhat fantastical production design, the sense that you’re watching a pop music video creeps in.
Fennell’s Hollywood career has an edge. The sex in Saltburn conveyed upper class decadence while the excellent Promising Young Woman, which brought home a screenwriting Oscar for the director, was a revenge parable about sexual violence against women.
But right from the moment Robbie’s adult Cathy speaks English in received – possibly Roedean – pronunciation instead of received Yorkshire, the film’s intentions to please American audiences rather than Brontë fans is writ large. I doubt either will be fully satisfied.
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