‘Watch for the close-up of copulating snails’: Is Wuthering Heights really as steamy as it promises?

FILM
“Wuthering Heights” ★★★
(M) 136 minutes

The period picture is receiving a thorough shake-up. Forget those meticulous Merchant Ivory recreations. Today’s period filmmakers prefer to recast the past as a sexed-up version of the present in fancy dress.

The trend began with Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite. Then it was given a vigorous nudge by the TV series Bridgerton. Now we have Emerald Fennell’s take on “Wuthering Heights”, which raises the stakes with a wealth of heaving bosoms, straining bodices and sexual metaphors. Watch for the close-up of the copulating snails.

Fennell acknowledges the fact that hers is a freewheeling adaptation of Emily Brontë’s doomed but deathless love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw by putting its title in quotation marks. The film was shot in Yorkshire but its design owes its idiosyncratic style to the current taste for “romantasy”.

Wuthering Heights, the Earnshaws’ gloomily decaying estate, looks as if it’s sitting between a northern variation on Stonehenge and an abandoned salt mine. Oversize spears of slate have popped up in inconvenient places and what remains of the house seems to be gradually sinking into the earth. In extravagant contrast, Thrushcross Grange, where Catherine goes to live after her marriage to Edgar Linton, is like a fusion of Fairyland and a five-star hotel in Dubai.

In this context, the casting of Margot Robbie as Catherine almost makes sense. Bronte’s Catherine is a creature of the moors – wilful, volatile and in her own way, as wild as Heathcliff, with a similar streak of cruelty. Robbie, a blonde beauty with a sunny smile, seemed totally at odds with this vision but in Fennell’s re-imagined Yorkshire, she fits right in.

All she needs is her appeal as an A-list movie star. Her acting talent is a bonus. As for her Heathcliff – fellow Australian Jacob Elordi – he’s appropriately cruel, moody and Byronic and more importantly, they make an exquisitely glamorous couple.

The costumes are even more eccentric than the production design. For being out and about on the moors, Catherine has a small selection of gingham dirndls which produce a Swiss milkmaid look – more Heidi than Bronte. But when she marries Edgar (Shazad Latif), she moves up to a series of eye-catching gowns seemingly made up of artfully employed swaths of PVC, tinfoil and cling wrap. She arrives at Thrushcross Grange on her wedding night gift-wrapped in a dress of cellophane.

Fennell’s earlier films, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, offered trenchantly effective comments on misogyny and the evils of the British class system and Bronte’s novel gives her plenty of material to work with.

The abuse Heathcliff suffers as a child leaves him with no love for anyone but Catherine once he becomes a man. And when she chooses to remain married to Linton, Heathcliff takes revenge with his own marriage to Linton’s sister, Isabella (Linton’s ward in this version), whom he despises and mistreats. This isn’t enough for Fennell, however. Accessorising the abuse with chains and a dog collar, she turns it into a black comic caricature of a sado-masochistic infatuation.

There have been numerous adaptations of the novel because it still has a lot to say. It dwells in the yawning gap that can open up between passion and morality.

Because of the savagery of his upbringing, Heathcliff has come to regard tolerance and moderation as signs of weakness, and despite her regard for status and security, Catherine feels the same way. They view themselves as being superior to the Lintons of the world because of the strength and ferocity of their feelings. And they see themselves reflected in one another, which makes their grand romantic obsession a form of self-love.

Bronte laid all this out without editorialising and Fennell follows her example – but the gaudiness of the window dressing keeps getting in the way.

Wuthering Heights is in cinemas from Thursday, February 12

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