We’ll always have Heated Rivalry, but there’s soon to be a new aesthetically perfect watch full of yearning coming to the big screen.
Emerald Fennell’s sweeping adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic Wuthering Heights starring Margot Robbi as Catherine Earnshaw, and Jacob Elordi as at Heathcliff, promises to be one of the cinematic events of the year. Long revered as a bastion of Gothic fiction, the genre of Brontë’s first and only novel has been a subject of much debate. Is this tale of intense of possession, revenge and reconciliation truly a love story?
As an English lit major, I studied Wuthering Heights, and have long asked myself the same question. It’s an intense story, not the easiest read, and (spoiler alert) does not have the happiest of endings. While it may not exactly spark joy, what Wuthering Heights does deliver is a fiery passion. From the look of the trailers for Fennell’s film, she captures this in spades.
“Since its publication two hundred years ago, critics have challenged Wuthering Heights‘ validity as a love story,” Fennell recently shared with the BFI. “It is too shocking, too cruel, too narratively strange to slip neatly into the world of romance, but it is a love story, nonetheless. While researching it, I rewatched many of my own favourite ‘love stories’, ones that challenged, subverted, even obliterated the conventions of the genre. These are stories which put the love story under duress, which stick a needle into the strawberry trifle, which show love in all its freakish, gory detail.”
In advance of the film’s release on February 13th, Fennell has curated a list of films she suggests as a complement to Wuthering Heights. Here are her four essential picks.
The Handmaiden (Director’s Cut),/em>
(2016)
This South Korean film is billed as an erotic historical psychological thriller based on the 2002 novel Fingersmith by Welsh author Sarah Waters. “The Handmaiden opens itself up slowly and to devastatingly sexy effect,” Fennell says. “A magic trick of a film that only gets cleverer the closer you look at it.”
Crash
(1996)
This David Cronenberg classic stars James Spader and Holly Hunter in what can only be described as a most unusual romance which is inspired by an underground world of car crash fetishism. “As certain to cause arguments in the lobby as any film out there,” Fennell shares. “Ice-cold, Brechtian, camp as hell, gorgeous in a profoundly inhuman way.”
The Beguiled
(2017)
This Sophia Coppola film set during the American civil war is set in a Virginia girls’ school run by Nicole Kidman. As a lover of Coppola’s films, many of which are focused on a not-quite-love-stories, Fennell explains she chose this one for its mystery and intensity. “In The Beguiled, poor Colin Farrell is a Civil War soldier who finds himself injured at a remote boarding school full of beautiful blondes. Things do not go well.”
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet
(1996)
Considered one of Baz Lurhmann’s greatest films, Claire Danes and Leonardo Di Caprio shine in this electric reimagining of the film complete with an iconic soundtrack. According to Fennell: “This film subverted what an adaptation could look like. Iconoclastic, funny, beautiful, heartbreaking it blew the dust off the source material like a hurricane.”
