Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights. Andrea Arnold. 2011

Such Great Heights

It is good to know that there are some other perspectives above the classics. It feels like discovering a new way of learning and loving. A new kind of «literature love».

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was one of the most interesting books I have ever studied; so full of narrative points of view and rhythm tricks that you could loose yourself throughout its pages for hours. By reading it, one could also pass exams and get to learn something important (literature terms speaking, I mean) but that is another story.

Probably the handsome beast of Heathcliff, has never been so clearly represented as it has in Andrea Arnold’s film. And the same happens with that special relationship he has with Catherine Earnshaw: black and white are carefully mixed with tenderness, so slowly and so weird that you almost forget they are human beings.

We usually get to know this novel with the eyes of the expert that knows everything about it. We have fantasized with reaching the same conclussions those wise people reach and in the end, we finally get a story that is not ours but theirs.

Another version of Wuthering Heights? Let me say that maybe this is not just a version.

The almost absence of soundtrack and all those short cuts, dazzled flared focus and trembling angles, could make the audience think they are entering a world such as Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves one. They should save their prejudices, because this is not a formal question.

A glance over few images from this film are enough to understand that this is not a typical portrait, neither a cliche: it opens audience’s intuition.

Something dealing with the animal thing and forces of nature is hanging on the wall of this plot. Maybe not the willing of Emily Brontë but a refreshing new angle, by the way.

And in relation to this: although the characters also drink tee in small cups (I dare say) anyone can notice they not belong the same world those films we were used to watch.

Good to them!