Les hauts de Hurlevent

This is a film about domestic violence, racism, cycles of abuse. It contains many scenes involving the infliction of pain. This is quite apart from the love story. So why did it leave my partner and I so unemotionally affected, apart from the rush of relief at leaving the cinema?

Wuthering Heights started well for me; I thought I was going to enjoy the experience of wild moorland, naturalism, authentic dirt, etc. Unfortunately, too little attention seemed to be paid to the quality of some of the cast's acting (some of which was, frankly, embarrassing) and after the nth roll on the wet moorland grass I began to lose patience with the lack of attention to the narrative detail.

Yes, the moors looked fantastic. Yes, we got that life was grim.

But the affectation of the hand-held camera is a metaphor for the film as a whole. It wobbles about and makes you feel a bit nauseous. And then it does it over and over again and again until you want to beg for mercy.

Saw this at the Venice film festival last week. It had quite a few walk outs near the beginning (probably the strong Yorkshire accents with lots of background noise made it unintelligible for non native English speakers) and they were the lucky ones as it certainly did not improve over the following 2 hours.

The director's main aim seemed to be to try and shock audiences who thought they were coming to an Emma Thompson type costume drama by making the film as morose as possible and throwing in lots of swearing, violence and a bit of necrophilia. Unfortunately the only shocking thing was that they had managed to make such a bad film out of a classic novel.

There were numerous petty things which annoyed me about this film, e.g. the use of pathetic fallacy with the weather is way over the top (the Earnshaws live under a constant biblical downpour whereas there rich neighbours in the next door valley have a climate from a fruit juice advert); the cameraman either had Parkinson's or had been previously employed in one of those American police series where reality is represented by a constantly jerky camera; the actors playing the adult Cathy and Heathcliff look nothing like their younger selves - Heathcliff even appears to have changed race!; would a 19th century strict Christian father be happy with someone sleeping with his teenage daughter in the house?; would a 19th century Heathcliff be able to swan around Edgar house willy nilly? I could go on.

Most importantly I think the director fails completely in making us feel any sympathy for her characters. Heathcliff has a hard time of it in his youth but has no redeeming features. It's not helped by the fact that the actor playing the adult Heathcliff is atrociously bad at his job.

I have no problem with making Wuthering Heights dark and brooding but make it a bit less daft.

I wouldn't recommend this film unless you like endless shots of bleak moorland, mud, circling lapwings and the backs of peoples'heads. Funny how the poster show the back of young Heathcliffe's head. I don't mind slow moving films where not much happens, but I didn't feel this particular film had the artistic merit to carry it off. It could have done with much more rigorous editing to bring the running time down to about 90 minutes.

Having Heathcliffe played by black actors was an interesting idea and worked well. I also liked it that a large part of the film concentrated on the early parts of the book -apparently in contrast to other film versions -especially as the younger actors performed quite well. It was as a shame that the acting deteriorated so much with the adult cast to the extent that I could detect no passion or chemistry between Heathcliffe and Cathy.

I thought the film was overall a dreary waste of time. It seems to have been liked more by the professional critics than by the real audience - show people grim raw reality far removed from their comfortable lives (I am referring to London based critics who only spend weekends in the country) and they are easily impressed. I got the same impression with reviews of Winter's Bone -a film I thought equally bad.

Although I will be aiming to judge Wuthering Heights on its own terms, I can't help sharing other reviewers' disappointment of this film. The book is bleak but wonderful, and I honestly find the characters and story much more compelling there than there.

Wuthering Heights(2011) isn't terrible as such. The scenery is stunning, likewise the costumes are quite good, the sound is very authentic and I liked the fact that the soundtrack is kept at minimal apart from at the end. The child counterparts of Cathy and Heathcliff are also truly excellent, especially Solomon Glave as a subdued and ferocious Heathcliff. Shannon Beer as young Cathy is just as striking. James Northcote is pretty effective as well, and Wuthering Heights does deserve credit for conveying a believable enough atmosphere especially at the start.

However, I didn't like the photography mostly. There are some nice shots here and there, but the hand-held camera work distracts from the bleakness of the story and seems too avant garde for a period piece for me. It may have worked in Red Road and Fish Tank, but it didn't here. The adult leads are not as good as the children, James Howson doesn't have enough of the characteristics that Glave brought and consequently he's bland. The fact that Glave and Howson don't look much alike takes away from the authenticity, and to me there is a lack of chemistry between Howson and Kaya Scodelario(who fares better, but Beer interested me more).

The script is very stilted. Just for the record, I wasn't expecting a letter-for-letter adaptation, and in all honesty there are not very many of those out there, but I don't think I was expecting dialogue that didn't flow very well from one line to the next or lines that came across as anachronistic. The story also disappoints. Granted the story of Wuthering Heights is a bleak and very difficult one to translate to screen, but in the translation here there is no passion, a lack of integrity in the ending, the way the story is told is too fractured in that the first half is better than the second by some considerable distance and the animal cruelty scenes were unnecessary and hard to watch.

Pacing is also an issue, the second half feels sluggish and I don't think the lack of chemistry helped nor with the lack of any likable or interesting characters, the support cast are much like caricatures as the film strips them of being any more memorable to make an effort to focus on the leads while ignoring the statuses and attitudes of the time, or ones to genuinely empathise with, they are too dull and underdeveloped to make me do that. Lastly, Mumford and Sons is a great song, but out of place here.

Overall, not a terrible film but a disappointing one. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Perhaps one of the more true-to-book versions BUT still they're missing a huge chunk of the story where Heathcliff diabolically and systematically ruins the lives of the progeny of his enemies, including Cathy's own child (whom he kidnaps and blackmails into marrying his son), his own son whom he lets die, his brother's son, etc. He's a real sociopath. I'm not sure why they leave such a dynamic portion of the story out solely to embrace a "romance plot" that really isn't that romantic nor accurate to the book.. So, sure watch this movie but for the full story as intended JUST READ THE BOOK. It's free, in the public domain, many sources.