Arnold: Wuthering Heights (2011)

Andrea Arnold’s version of Wuthering Heights is the first to cast a black actor in the role of Heathcliff (James Howson), reframing the story – which, like most adaptations, omits the second generation of characters – as something of a displaced slave narrative. Perhaps the most powerful result of that post-colonial twist is that it allows Arnold to bring out the sheer strangeness of Bronte’s Yorkshire in a quite original way – from the very first sequence, the moors feel as if they’re more remote than the most distant colonial outpost, or wherever it is that Heathcliff is from. In part, that’s due to the stark, brittle shooting style, which is almost Dogme in its austerity – apart from the closing shot, there’s no music, and hardly any speech, as Arnold seems prescient that it won’t work with a writer like Emily Bronte to simply transplant dialogue to the screen, or resort to dialogue at all. Similarly the camera’s nearly always in chaotic, handheld motion; it feels as beholden to wind as to light, buffeted from one barely glimpsed vista to another. Among other things, that means that we’re never allowed to repose upon the moors as a panoramic spectacle – in fact, their expansiveness is so monotonous and monochromatic that it ceases to ramify spatially at all, and becomes positively claustrophobic as Arnold fuses it into a single, oceanic abstraction. As a result, it’s Catherine (Kaya Scodelario) and her family, rather than Heathcliff, who feel alien – and, although that means that Heathcliff is very much the protagonist, it doesn’t seem like we’re meant to sympathise with him in a conventional psychological way. Instead, our identification is more visceral and tactile – in a stark riposte to the deep-focus long takes of Wyler’s 1939 version, the camera rarely strays from close-ups of Heathcliff’s face and body and, when it does, tends to include him in the blurred foreground. That makes focusing exhausting – gaining visual traction – and beautifully evokes the shock of Heathcliff’s eyes and body at his new landscape, even as it abstracts and bleeds him into the wild air, clearest whenever his communion with Catherine is strongest. And that zone between Heathcliff and the air is where the film’s drama occurs, where it feels most universal. Combined with Arnold’s grotesque botanical and zoological interludes, halfway between a bestiary and a memento mori, it conjures up some vast, ecological drama, of which Heathcliff and Catherine’s romance is just one oblivious, tortured moment.