"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" **

"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" does not work on its own terms because Emerald Fennell does not pick a lane, because she has no good original ideas, and because she has no cinematic taste. She thinks she’s daring and transgressive but actually she’s just crass and juvenile and undercuts any attempts her actors are making to inject credibility or elicit sympathy from the audience. Hong Chau is good as Nelly and Jacob Elordi tries hard as Heathcliff in a straight drama. Isabella is played - problematically - for broad knowing laughs in a second separate film. Martin Clunes is playing a Dickensian villain in a third. Margot Robbie is just too old and haggard to play Cathy at any age. Ultimately though this is Fennell’s failure. I laughed at the screen when Clunes died amidst two piles of empty gin bottles. I laughed harder when Atlanta was burning. We get it Emerald: you watched GONE WITH THE WIND and REBECCA. Now please do fuck off and direct music videos. 

"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" REALLY does not work as an adaptation of Emily Bronte’s actually transgressive novel. The juvenile absurd emotions turned up to eleven revenge psychodrama that Cathy and Heathcliff put each other through only makes sense when you know they are adolescents - when Cathy dies at 20. The idea that marrying Heathcliff would degrade Cathy only works when money won’t wash over his “otherness” because he is either the son of a black slave or a gypsy or a lascar. There is no evidence in the book that they ever had sex. It’s not a love story. It’s a story of psychosexual sadism carried over three generations. Eliminating Hindley means we have no Hindley-Heathcliff-Cathy triad to mirror the Edgar-Heathcliff-Cathy triad or the Hareton-Heathcliff-Cathy2 triad. 

Of course Emerald Fennell is narcissistic enough to think we give a shit about how SHE felt reading the novel at 14 and that the book is unfilmable. But Andrea Arnold made a superb film of the first half off this book. And I hate to break it to you Emerald, we watch this because of Bronte not you. 

And don’t even get me going on a deeply privileged white woman blathering on in press tours about how this is a female made movie as if this allows her to erase the fact that the lead actor should be a person of colour and that the entire story is about him being diminished for being brown. And then - just to add insult to injury - Margot Robbie parading jewelry stolen from Mughal India and ascribing its ownership to Liz Taylor - erasing its actual origin. Either they are racist or stupid or both. 

WUTHERING HEIGHTS" is rated R and has a running time of 136 minutes.  It gets a star for Hong Chau and a star for Martin Clunes. 

More thoughts: Heathcliff’s continual demand of consent from Isabella was deeply troubling. A joke, played for recognition. But also part of the overall softening of Heathcliff and Cathy - to make them “likeable” and credible as a love story gone wrong. Young Cathy isn’t pinching and punching staff. Heathcliff doesn’t kill Isabella’s dogs. Eliminating the back half of the book makes Heathcliff a lot less violent and indeed borderline necro. I also feel that making Cathy’s baby die early in the womb so that Cathy then dies of septicaemia is a way for Emerald to keep Cathy/Robbie looking “pretty” and unpregnant to the end. It allows Cathy and Heathcliff to keep pretending that they are starcrossed lovers in arrested development.  Emerald can’t handle them being culpable adults as much as they can’t.

SALTBURN** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Opening Night Gala

Emerald Fennell's second directorial feature is a desperately disappointing mash-up of superior works.  We begin with forty minutes of Brideshead, before morphing into The Talented Mr Ripley by way of The Blandings and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Worse still, Fennell uses transgressive sexual acts to paper over the unoriginal and meandering plot. The film is not as darkly funny as she thinks it is. And its only saving graces are Rosamund Pike as the AbFab clueless matriarch, and Carey Mulligan in a touching cameo as the mother's addict friend Pamela. One star for each of them, and half a star for Richard E Grant shouting "Just eat the bloody pie!"

Barry Keoghan stars as the Ripley-esque Oliver Quick, a Fresher at a fantasy Oxford where  you drive up to the Rad Cam, smoke in your room, and students not tourists drink at the KA. Oliver is drawn into the in-crowd when he helps out Felix Catton (Euphoria's Jacob Elordi), and lands an invitation to his Brideshead-style country house, Saltburn. In addition to Felix, Oliver charms the Wodehousian ditsy father, caustically selfish mother and vulnerable sister (newcomer Alison Oliver). The only person who seems on to his manipulations from the start is the family's poor relation Farrell (Archie Madekwe - GRAN TURISMO).  Game senses game. 

The film proceeds at a leisurely pace, with every plot twist telegraphed years in advance. The way the film develops will not surprise anyone with a shred of (cine-) literacy. There are occasional lines or scenes that are mordantly funny and brilliantly constructed, mostly involving Pike and Mulligan.  But between them, ennui and an infantile desire to shock.

Fennell's first feature, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, was just that. SALTBURN is a step back. Will her inevitable third feature show this to be a mis-step? Will her directorial choices add to her narrative or to continue to be puzzling (why the 4:3 aspect ratio?) or showy without effect (look! mirrors!)?

SALTBURN has a running time of 127 minutes. It will open in the USA on November 24th.

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN is the stunning debut feature from actor-writer-director Emerald Fennell. It's the darkest of dark comedy thrillers that impresses with how it manages to handle the nastiest of subject matter, to genuinely thrill, move and entertain. To direct something that manages such swift changes in tone and mood, but never felt jarring or out of control, is a skill and feat that has beaten many more seasoned directors. I simply cannot wait to see what Fennell does next, whether reprising her role as Camilla Parker-Bowles in the THE CROWN or creating her next movie.

The film casts Carey Mulligan against type (see review for the awful THE DIG) as a very smart but deeply damaged thirty year old woman who seeks revenge on the cohort of "nice guys" who think nothing of taking drunk girls home from bars and raping them. To do so, Cassie goes to bars, pretends to be drunk, waits for the inevitable to happen and then shocks her victims with her stone cold sober retribution.  Just what the nature of that retribution is, and the reason for Cassie's rage, are withheld for the first half of the film, creating a brilliantly intriguing and disturbing tension.  This is especially acute when Cassie's revenge moves beyond men to the women who have internalised misogyny and slut-shaming and enable the crimes to go hidden and covered up and the institutions (universities, psychiatry) that further victimise women. I genuinely gasped when Cassie involved the daughter of one of her targets in her deceptions and the idea that our hero-protagonist might actually be more evil than her targets was a nasty but brilliant tease.

What really impresses is how credible all of this is - from Cassie's trauma to the arse-covering excuses given to her by all involved (not least a great performance from Alison Brie as the most smug of middle class mothers who has a come to jesus moment). I really felt for these characters - not just Cassie, but even people like Alfred Molina's guilt-ridden psychiatrist. It's really testament to Emerald Fennell's direction that the film moves you even as it uses garish almost cartoonish visuals and music. I loved the chintzy overbearing interiors of Cassie's childhood home and the pop-coloured coffee shop run by her wonderfully sympathetic boss (Laverne Cox). I also loved the visual imagery that often sees Cassie depicted with angelic wings even as she does pretty nasty things. And the fact that the script is willing to go to an ending that is fittingly dark.  

Honestly, I cannot think of a single thing I didn't like about this film. Like it's heroine, it's smart and dark and thrilling, and it speaks to issues that need urgent attention. Kudos to all involved. 

YOUNG WOMAN has a rating of R and a running time of 113 minutes. The film played Sundance 2020 and was released on streaming services in January 2021.