Moor or less - film preview
The trailer for Emerald Fennell's film version of "Wuthering Heights" (quotation marks hers - or her publicist's) has just appeared, to a storm of social media speculation and criticism.
Clearly, this was the intention, a phenomenon known as 'rage bait', and it seems to have worked a treat. Now the movie has to live up - or down - to expectations when it goes on general release on Valentine's Day. Can it sustain this level of feverish speculation for another six months? You bet it can.
Though teasing, the trailer reveals enough about Fennell's vision of the melodrama to give some indication of what we can expect from her adaptation. The poster, featuring Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) in a steamy clinch, sets the tone, as does its invite to audiences to 'come undone'. Based on Fennell's previous outing with Elordi in Saltburn I think it's fair to expect something smoulderingly erotic. How much relation that will bear to Emily Brontë's novel is another matter entirely.
There had already been criticism of the casting (too old, too white, too perfect) and costumes (anachronistic) which the trailer has reignited. But one thing that gives me some confidence that Fennell's realisation will attempt to capture faithfully the spirit of the original is that its outdoor sequences were filmed entirely in the Yorkshire Dales - Arkengarthdale and Swaledale to be precise - leading one to hope that the elemental nature of the moorland landscape, so central to the brooding atmosphere of the novel, will be allowed to play a major part. Never mind Edgar Linton, it is the third character in this relationship.
My childhood in the 1960s was spent on the edge of what is now dubbed 'Brontë Country" by marketeers. The farmhouses in which I grew up still had flagstones floors, smoky inglenook fireplaces, cast iron ranges, exposed beams - and ice on the inside of bedroom window panes in winter. In a word, bleak, but nevertheless romantic and hugely formative in a suggestible adolescent's emotional development. If Fennell can capture even a fraction of that teen spirit she will have succeeded in my eyes.
Whatever her intention, her offering seems set to be a camp romp, though not, one hopes, without some serious purpose. The style of costume dramas nowadays is less concerned with historical accuracy and more with capturing a mood - and not necessarily the mood of the times in which they are set. Perhaps it was ever thus, certainly in Hollywood, when costume, hair and makeup - particularly the women's - made few concessions to period accuracy. Charli XCX's songs will add an unapologetically contemporary contribution to Fennell's soundtrack, a trend set by M83's haunting 'I Am Your King' intro to the TV costume drama, Versailles.
Robbie/Cathy's highly anachronistic white wedding outfit looks likely to set a trend for summer brides and we can expect dressmakers to be scrambling to perfect their décolletages and full skirts, while florists strive to source exactly the right blue blooms to replicate her patriotic (and again ahistorical) red, white and blue bridal bouquet. Young men, meanwhile, will be growing their sideburns as I write. It seems we must all brace ourselves for Wuthering mania in 2025.
As speculation about the film is rife, permit me to add to it. Reports from Dales locals during filming tell of Robbie and Elordi, in costume, riding an old-style tractor. They were preceded by a Range Rover so surely, if the purpose were to get them to a location, the sensible thing would have been to ride in that rather than risk a Massey Ferguson? It's no spoiler to mention that the novel closes with rumour of a sighting of the ghosts of the ill-fated couple wandering the moors together. Could the pair on a tractor be Fennell's homage to this? I can't wait to find out.