Wuthering Heights (2011)

Heathcliff. His name is the landscape and in Andrea Arnold’s adaptation, so is he – lying in muck or wind-raked grass, letting the rain beat him in the face.

Emily Brontë’s classic has rarely been treated right on small or big screens. Sold mostly as Jane Austen-style period drama (2009 TV Serial) or softened romance (1939 film), anyone smitten with the novel will tell you a film adaptation needs a strong dose of realism if it is to be anywhere near as affecting. Arnold is the first director to realise this, immediately elevating her film above all other Wuthering Heights made so far.

Apparently found on the streets of Liverpool, Heathcliff is adopted by Mr. Earnshaw and brought home to live with his family in the North Yorkshire moors. The book obscures Heathcliff’s origins although Brontë describes him as ‘gypsy’, something which no adaptation has yet taken on board. In this film, he is black, a feasible choice well followed through and one that reinforces the scorn set against him by Earnshaw’s son Hindley.

Close-ups of moths, dust, hair, beetles and clouds ground the story in earthy Yorkshire. Importantly though, this is a subjective realism – Heathcliff’s. The story follows him as if it were his story, with all the other characters appearing incidentally. This agenda is most clearly set out at the point where young Heathcliff leaves the moors after overhearing part of Cathy’s conversation with her maid. It is probably the most quoted dialogue of the book:

It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now*; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

The * is the point at which the hidden Heathcliff leaves for 3 years, returning only after amassing a great fortune. He never hears the following:

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind.

And in this film, neither do we. The camera follows Heathcliff out into the night as Cathy’s voice trails away.

This approach works very well indeed; the intimacy we acquire with the character promises an exciting final third. This is because, although Heathcliff is obviously a quiet and stoic character, what binds you to the book is the moments when he explodes out of his shell with the kind of melodrama only an introvert can hit. Unfortunately, at the film’s climax, these moments are either too tame or unconvincing. The unremarkable acting might have been hidden better by avoiding the proclamations of love lifted from the novel. These only highlighted the lack of passion in delivery.

However, there are good performances for the majority of the film. Especially noteworthy are the child actors who play young Cathy and Heathcliff; they manage to evoke the slow-growing sensuality between the young couple believably. All too often, other adaptations give a few shots of a boy and girl playing together before the young adults take over, suddenly emerging with a fully-fledged sexuality unearned by the previous scenes. This film does it properly, building the relationship from the roots of friendship, unashamedly showing the youngsters innocently aroused by horse rides or playfights in the mud, becoming slowly and naturally acquainted with their own adolescence.

The camerawork is well considered, hand-held a lot of the time (sometimes annoyingly so) but reining it in to simple mid-shots in all the right places. The establishing shots really capture the Yorkshire moors well – the best I’ve seen. My favourites are the wide shots of the Heights during strong gales where the camera seems to wuther with the wind (I can only think they achieved this by tying it to a tree somehow). Intelligent musical choice too – not to have any. Perfect. No story deserves a blank score more. If any future adaptation does manage to keep the story intimate, the setting isolate, and the characters believable, with music underscoring events, I will be more than impressed.

Overall, this is the best Wuthering Heights film so far. It isn’t perfect – the climax needed to be far more moving – but its realism and character development is second to none, so it is definitely the one that fans of the novel should go for.

Let the Right One In (2008)

Photo by Michael Taylor

ODEON, Huddersfield – As charmless, expensive and bland as any links in that giant chain. Yet most Tuesday evenings last winter found me trekking the 1.7 miles out of town past looming gasworks and derelict mills towards the single sacred multiplex in the HD postal area.

On one of the coldest nights of my life, the ‘Film Fan Tuesday’ feature was Let the Right One In. Caught between impossible black-iced pavement and sodium streetlights, I passed no one, finally reaching the cinema just in time. I walked in and sat down as the snowflakes of the first shot invaded the screen. What followed served to laden with doom thoughts of the walk home; never before had I crossed the threshold from pedestrian to film viewer and found the atmosphere on both sides so alike.

Set in a Swedish suburb so dark and cold that barely anyone populates the evening landscapes, the film centres on 12-year-old Oskar, a victim of ritual schoolyard bullying who becomes close friends with Eli, a child vampire.

Vampire characters usually reside comfortably within the realm of fantasy horror, giving filmmakers the opportunity to explore melodramatic folklore and graphic violence, inflicting thrills and chills on a suspecting audience. Let the Right One In ignores that potential in favour of a more ‘social realism’ style of storytelling. Writer John Ajvide Lindqvist and director Tomas Alfredson are concerned with themes such as cruelty, loyalty and innocence as seen from the perspective of a pre-adolescent boy. At its heart, the film is a tender love story. There just happens to be a vampire involved.

Cinematography is key in creating the sense of intimacy needed. Soft light reduces shadow in many scenes, leaving room for Alfredson’s expressive shallow focus to draw the eye over wide shots to different points of interest over time. Slow camera movement gives us this time, enhancing the realism whilst playing with what we are allowed to see. None of these are obvious choices for a film that leans into the horror genre but they are what give it character and style.

The choreography of hands cannot be underestimated either. A constant visual motif throughout, they are used as a reliable means of discerning Oskar and Eli’s emotions.

As Alfredson explains ‘it’s very hard to lie with the hands’. The first time Eli touches Oskar is to take hold of his hand while insisting he hit back against the bullies. Later they communicate through the wall that separates their bedrooms using morse code to tap out messages.

As a powerful supernatural being, Eli offers Oskar strength and support. In return, Oskar gives Eli the chance to experience the things her condition has stolen from her – childhood and innocent love. They bond over a Rubik’s Cube, a puzzle that confuses Eli until Oskar tells her ‘Just twist it’ – an ironic instruction given the neck that Eli has broken in the previous scene to score her latest meal.

Perhaps the most successful use of the vampiric component of the story is its juxtaposition with the hard reality of bullying. While Eli is clearly tortured by her thirst for blood and the violence it necessitates (sobbing after each kill), Oskar’s tormentors choose to make his life a living freezing hell. Listening to the director/writer’s commentary on the DVD, it is clear whose evils the makers are more prone to forgive.

So considering the sympathetic portrayal of the film’s ‘monster’ and the plot’s revolution around love rather than gore, why was I so hyper-aware on my walk back through the night after leaving the cinema? Well, the weather certainly helped. Alfredson’s evocation of dark Scandinavian nights becomes easy to appreciate during Britain’s coldest winter for 30 years. Too cold for most people to bother going out in, it is easy to believe Eli and her helper Hakan can commit their gruesome deeds unnoticed on the fringes of populated areas. And it’s the fringes you have to navigate when your hilly northern town plonks its only cinema down in a location convenient only for cars to reach. It’s not ideal but, in the context of this particular experience, it’s perfect.