I cannot live without my soul

Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of the famous Emily Bronte ‘love story’ has its fair share of detractors, but whether you like her Wuthering Heights or hate it, you haven’t seen it done like this before. After the psycho-sexual anguish of her unsettling debut Red Road and the age-inappropriate and class-based relationship drama Fish Tank (one of my favourite films of 2010), Arnold seems the perfect person to tell the classic story of annihilated romantic love. I doubt that this is an adaptation that purists would enjoy.

This is the story of Catherine Earnshaw and her soul mate Heathcliff (played as children by Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave, and as adults by Kaya Scodelario and James Howson), and how Heathcliff’s passion for Cathy is a major irruptive force in the rural English setting. Heathcliff was brought home by Cathy’s father, and he is raised as one of the children in some ways, and as a domestic/farm worker in others. Cathy’s brother Hindley (Lee Shaw) is especially antagonistic towards this new addition, who struggles with English and whose vocabulary destabilises the superficial peace of Wuthering Heights. Here we have two changes Arnold introduces into the famous story: restrained, forceful dialogue occasionally including profanities, and making Heathcliff a dark skinned foreigner who is out of place not only in the Heights, but in rural England.

Making Heathcliff black could be a cosmetic change at the best of times, but Arnold regularly uses his blackness to emphasise how he doesn’t belong in Cathy’s world. If Wuthering Heights is about a man who is driven by an uncontainable passion for a single woman, making him dark skinned establishes the character as even more of an outcast, a sinner. Heathcliff is the one shown in regular contact with animals, and is shown to have a certain capacity for what one may call sanctioned violence: cutting the throat of a goat to let it drown in its blood, or snapping the spine of a rabbit. (The film’s representations of Heathcliff’s violent interaction with animals are very discomforting; sensitive viewers, be warned.)

Arnold’s vision of Wuthering Heights is one of persistent basic drives and urges that are repeatedly frustrated. As children, Cathy and Heathcliff are assumed to be doing improper things with one another, but as we never see any of these allegations made manifest, it’s clear that while ‘everyone knows’ what’s not-yet-but-almost happening between them, young physical love has not yet arrived in full. Arnold shows the children moving around one another in the dark, damp farmhouse, or outside enjoying the lushness of the grass, or rolling in the mud. While very little sexual happens on screen, every frame is loaded with intent. The first part of the film is about the child years, whereas the second part deals with the fates of the adult Catherine and Heathcliff; in Arnold’s imagery, an already tragic (and to many familiar) story becomes devastating.    

The force of the film owes much not only to the actors inhabiting the characters, but to Arnold’s aesthetic: shot on 16mm film and exhibited in the director’s approved 4:3 ratio, Wuthering Heights achieves a sense of heightened intimacy that affectively amplifies the events on screen. I have seen the film described as “difficult”, even “painful”, but daring cinemagoers will find their bravery matched by Arnold’s visualisation.