Emily Brontë at the heart of pop erotica

Part of the blame for the romanticization of this short story has kept it in the crosshairs of many cinematographic adaptations, signed by directors from the era of Luis Buñuel or Jacques Rivette, which today includes the British filmmaker Emerald Fennell.

Released in theaters this February 13, the film marks twenty years and reissues of Brontë’s work and is a moment of reimagining of the classic romance novel and in full force in the Jane Austen universe, fueled by series such as Bridgerton moose.

Si bien Brontë belongs to a generation later than the author Pride and Prejudicehe shares with her both the theme of his work, with cross-class love and strong female protagonists, as well as a very recognizable aesthetic set in rural England. Anyway, that’s it Cumbres borrascosas This landscape turns out to be much harsher and more turbulent than Austen’s novels.

The low price of the Yorkshire moors is one of the common elements of the disparate film adaptations of the work.

From the first and most epic, directed in 1939 by William Wyler and starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, to the latest and most terrifying, with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine Earnshaw and the anti-hero Heathcliff.

Climatology is also very much present in director Peter Kosminski’s 1992 film with intense Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, with a gothic style similar to Dracula Francis Ford Coppola, last year.

But I’m looking for a rawer dimension in the adaptation by another British author, Andrea Arnoldová, who in 2011 wrote one of the most incendiary versions of Brontë’s story.

With her usual naturalism, the director Fr Bird (2024) American honey (2014) conveys the brutality of this muddy and hidden place where love and hate sprout in equal measure. Heathcliff is a young beggar adopted by the patriarch of the Earnshaw family, who takes him under his protection.

His master Hindley, driven by envy, abuses him and condemns him to serve as his slave until his father’s death. Heathcliff finds affection only in his children Nelly, one of the narrators of the novel, and in his mother Cathy, very enthusiastic and eager to live among pleasures.

With this last brota, a childish and unrelenting love that will be truncated by Cathy’s desire to become “the most distinguished lady in the land”. Of the desire to hear from the poor, alejan humble Heathcliff.

“I’d marry him back home,” says the protagonist, who lives before the wealth of her elders, the Lintons, and marries Edgar, the young rich man of the family.

This decision needs to be clarified the gentle and cruel character of Heathcliff, which must raise a tide of hatred and desire to destroy them all.

In Brontë’s work, Heathcliff is described as a “dark-skinned gypsy” with “black eyes like the devil’s vintner”. On screen, only Andrea Arnold, who chose two racially competent actors to portray the protagonist at different stages of his life, respected his mestizo origins.

A very relevant decision for understanding the novel as a whole, that’s what Cumbres borrascosas It is not a story of conventional love, but rather a story of desire between social classes, racism and lived generational trauma.

de facto a white actor’s interpretation of Heathcliff It is one of the main controversies surrounding the film Emerald Fennell.

Company director Young prometedor (2020) took care of introducing some of the stories in his new film of the same name. Many entries have been attached to the above, It does not pretend to be a literal adaptation: “You can’t adapt a book so dense and complicated.

As Fennell re-used his memories to create a new version of the work, more field and the impression the novel made on her when she was a teenager.

This is well known Rare recordings are often shot in reality: you have to understand things that never happened or that you wish would happen again. With what Fennell scandalized you, eroticism is not casual Saltburn (2023), halfway between pornography and escatológico, wanted to tell a story between Cathy and Heathcliff.

Among the high school classes that the British filmmaker is looking for is that the character of the evil Hindley does not exist in the film, it is señor Earnshaw who torments Heathcliff and Cathy with his alcoholism and gambling addiction.

While characters like Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver), who subdues Heathcliff to torture his true lover, seeks in the disgusted rapist a larger role for his lover’s most vile sexual practices.

On the other hand, Nelly, a studious child, is here the lady of the coming company, who clarifies all the conflicts and eternal misunderstandings between the two protagonists.

Played by Hong Chau, he will better reflect that Heathcliff – whose bad placement in this adaptation is something of a decaf – longs to return to be vaped by capricious Cathy.

This last item will be removed at once I look forward to the house of muñecas who are in prisonas sung by Charli XCX and John Cale (an excellent duo) on the soundtrack.

Gothic romance hard to digest for the most blessed and the strict students of the Brontë brothers, who took on the project from outside their trailer and are likely to see the final result.

Surprisingly though Fennell seems more withdrawn than in the previous filmmention saltburn, for many we love the Brontë characters are lovers of BDSM y which dispenses with the sound of a man’s moaning.

Prepared to find that they are not pleased by pain: they are horrified in the public square, in front of a crowd that aids the execution as a moral lesson, where preachers and authorities label the condemned as sinners and advise the public not to follow their example.

But at the same time, there’s something of a morbid celebration to this show, a dark energy that young Cathy absorbs in every possible way that works as a way to rob her of her innermost desires. Fennell explains an idea that also ran through his earlier work: desire, perversion, sin and lust.

The director wanted the audience to fall in love with these two morally reprehensible personalities everything, and the selection from the list is the first: Margot Robbie on high ground, using her aura of unstoppable beauty (and the star of the film’s producer) and Jacob Elordi, a specialist in embodying men as seductive as mezquinos – as in his own Saltburn or in a series Euphoria—.

The two develop the same relationship of passion and addiction that we see between Edward and Bella in the saga Crepúsculo (2006) as written by Fennell Hubiese AND fan fiction to satisfy your teenager.

As expected, the British filmmaker, who also signed the film, she sacrificed the sobriety and wholeness of Emily Brontë to be true to herself yes, in a hyperstylish universe: halfway between Tim Burton’s fetishism, Baz Luhrmann’s excess and historical horrors Marie Antoinette (2006) by Sofia Coppola.

Dress Jacqueline Durran (Oscar winner dir Mujercitas), with shiny fabrics and plastic cases, married to Margot Robbie, this time as Victorian Barbie.

While Suzie Davies’ art direction is as much in the Linton house as it is in the Earnshaw house openly dreamy spaceswhere even the protagonist’s skin-colored sleeping area functions as an extension of her body and her deformed desire.

To enjoy it, if it is to be seen as one customization CUmbrian borrascosas hija de su tempo This visual envelope, sometimes pleasing and other times deconstructed, serves mainly to enhance Fennell’s pop imagination.

British filmmaker insists on the heightened romanticism of the story – “I know people are so loud they throw up,” he said – offering a pop and twisted revision of a classic that, as sung by Charli XCX, is easy to fall in love with over and over again.