Wuthering heights (2011)

Andrea Arnold caught my attention by her almost-brilliant Fish tank, a vital, yet dark, story about youth and despair. Wuthering heights sticks to the same theme, and the vitality is there. But the films are still very different. When Arnold takes on Emily Bronté she does it sensuously, evoking place more than psychology - well, as a matter of fact, psychology is here reduced to a state of gruesome longing, the impossible love story and - you expected it - the wretchedness of the world. This longing is placed in an equally gruesome surrounding; there's wind, there's merciless earth and there's dirt. Rather than being an excuse for having the characters parade in nice costumes and prattle on about Romance, Arnold takes her Wuthering heights to a much more desolate place, a place that lodges no more that pain and a dizzy sense of attraction. The camera restlessly jumps and twitches, nearly never composing traditional images of faces or landscapes as a backdrop. Nothing is pretty. The characters crawl along Yorkshire moors or they sit glumly in dark corners. It's hard to describe how achingly beautiful these raw images of nature are, you must look for yourself.  Heathcliffe is rendered as a black man and racism appears as one aspect of the hostile world in which the two lovers grow up. Arnold focuses on these relationships, often violent (where the violence tends to have an ambiguous role) and obsessive, without sentimentality. The erotic currents of the story is emphasized but nothing is spelled out; this is a world in which there are BIG emotions but they are never pinned down. This is the strength of the movie - how emotions are rooted in the moor, the wind, the dirt, the crags, the ominous quip of birds, sudden sunlight. Heavy on atmosphere? Yes, but in an exhilarating way, a way that changes one's perception. Not many films do.

The last part of the film, in which the almost-siblings are grown-up, one of them married, turns out to be somewhat disappointing. The story churns and churns and nothing much is added. This is precisely the point, but it is hard to make something out of it as a viewer. In particular, I found the insertion of a song by Mumford and sons in the very end to be extremely ill-chosen. That song was a million miles from everything this movie stands for.