"Wuthering Heights" - when loving lovers love
It begins with a very horny public execution. Don't remember that from the book? It's fine, that's why Emerald Fennell's film adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights is called "Wuthering Heights." Swaddled in quotation marks, it does whatever it damn well pleases.
The public execution is a hanging. The man about to die has an erection. Death has a dickprint. Women heave their breasts toward the camera, thrilled to witness this man's final boner. A nun sighs ecstatically. The soundtrack is a type of breathing and mechanical creaking from which follows orgasm or imminent demise, depending on context. The man expires, ejaculating in his trousers. Why not? Another day's entertainment for fans of well-hung dudes delivered to Hell, starring Lust and its identical cousin Bloodlust.
Why Not is the animating force of this hyperpop "Wuthering Heights," which isn't entirely about public hangings, but is absolutely a large dumb terrarium of sensation: a slick, sweaty, chest-beating, garment-rending, gloopy-albumen total eclipse of the heart. Fennell has left behind the direct, earnest messaging of her debut feature, Promising Young Woman, and become the conductor on the Saltburn Express, a Grand Guignol tour of goofy behavior and sexy death consequences.
And because this is a freestyle cover version of a novel, and a remix of other cinematic covers of that same novel, many of which stop the show after the first generation of characters become ghosts and/or lose their shit, this Wuthering jam takes its characters and the audience only so far.
Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Catherine (Margot Robbie), from youth to adulthood, are "out on the wily, windy moors" with some regularity, their desire for each other as strong as pheremones can muster, but not stronger than Cathy's desire to live like a Lady. She marries the rich guy up the road. After that everything gets complicated and agitated and, if you've read the book or seen the umpteen other versions, haunted, with several sides of madness.
But again, it's Fennell's turn here, and Why Not? She wants them to fuck so they fuck, which is good for cinema on one level because, like the internet asked not long ago, why is everyone beautiful and no one horny? Together they are dolls in a dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse, Robbie's Doom Barbie playing with a Rough Sex w/Consent Ken. Their sexual encounters are more licky-tongue-y than just about anything seen in contemporary cinema, and it's more fun than watching people do it in a Catherine Breillat film.
The weird part about all of that: Unlike any number of Breillat films, which frequently explore the pitch-dark, collapsing side of sex and desire, Fennell ramps up the lust but strips her Heathcliff and Cathy of the more brutal aspects of character that previously turned this story of yearning into a tale of reckoning, settling instead for an excitable, art-directed countdown to Cathy's eventual death, the heroine's inevitable demise mapped out by Fennell like a lover plotting a fashionable murder. When you finally get what you want, your greatest desire, and everything still falls apart, it wasn't because the stifling morality of your particular historical era prevented you from a full expression of secretive sex, but because of some other reasons, ones that soften the blows: less cruelty, less insanity, less generational real-estate wrangling, and no marriages between first cousins, no matter how little sense it makes. Why Not becomes simply Why.
In the midst of this confusion, there are pleasures. Robbie's Cathy is a fine drama queen, a world-class competitive cryer, a person you already know is going to die glamorously, and one you hope will be allowed the additional chic status of becoming a very intense phantom. But as in Saltburn, Elordi is the real show. The camera's gaze devours his intimidating height, biceps, tangled mane, unkempt beard, chest hair, sweat, and, we are told, body odor, his crouching and his brooding, his enormous ax, and his puffy shirt, wet down like it's contest day at MTV's Spring Break Beach House.
The production design, above all, is Why. Sets, costumes, and props become their own reason to experience this iteration, and they tell their own story about the advantages of wealth and having a surrealist interior decorator create your expansive estate. It's a Farrow & Ball fantasy, with walls as alive as Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.
The theme of this design expo is voluptuous foreshadowing, and the color of the moment is red – skirts, blouses, gelatin, floors, drinkware, jewels, gloves, ribbons, capes, candles, mushrooms, walls, skies, and yes, blood, of pigs and people – a nod to the banality of the color's assigned role in love, sex, and death, all while allowing it to continue that assigned role. Or maybe it's just a grand, thirsty shout-out to Kate Bush.
There are repeat visits to wetness: not just mist and rain, but egg yolks, white slugs, squelching yeasted bread dough, fingers in the mouths of fish, and slimy art-leeches. There are routine images of tunnels, arches, curved passageways, crevices, and vaginal papercraft pop-up books, all of them invitations to more associations and big finishes.
The decorative elements are strong. The meaning is muddled. The text is dismantled and put together again with impunity. It's fun to watch beautiful people live in beautiful places and then fuck themselves into misery, detached from life itself, while Charli XCX's dance track turns the final credits into Club Heathcliff. Why not.
