To ask if you're looking forward to the "re-imagined" Wuthering Heights?

[Toeragg]

I can't wait! Jacob Eldori's wig looks a bit dodgy in the first part but he scrubs up well when Heathcliff becomes rich. Not sure about the Yorkshire accent.

Margot Robbie looks a bit too old and glowy to be Cathy but I'm there for the frocks, the interiors and the scenary!

Anyone else going?

WH was never a romantic novel in our modern interpretation of 'romance'. However, WH was very much in keeping with the beliefs held by the Romantic poets (who Emily Bronte loved) e.g. the superiority of emotion over logic, the reverence of nature Vs. the hatred of industrialisation, the idealisation of the innocence of children etc.

Cathy and Heathcliffe are at their best/purest when they are children, running wild across the moors, at one with nature and each other. It's only when puberty hits and they have to engage with the real world that they become 'corrupted'.

Adult Heathcliffe isn't a passionate, rough diamond with a heart of gold. He's a nasty, cruel bastard who beats up his pregnant wife and viciously slaughters her pet dog. He isn't in love with Cathy, he is obsessed with her and would prefer to see her dead than with another man.

Adult Cathy isn't a sweet, passionate, free spirit. She's incredibly shallow, selfish and self centered, marries poor Edgar purely for his money, and proceeds to be a hateful bitch to him. Cathy isn't in love with Heathcliffe, she just loves the fact that he is obsessed with her.

They are both horrible people who deserved each other.

It is Catherine Linton and Hareton who have the romance story of WH and who actually have some chance of a happy ending.

I searched the trailer and now have loads of WH reactions. Apparently it’s called ‘iPhone face’ (not heard of it, maybe it’s a common term?), where someone looks distinctly modern and it ruins the immersion because they don’t fit the period.

Interesting to me, as it’s something I always noticed and I really dislike modern historical-fiction movies/TV. It completely ruins the immersion, along with modern accents.

To be fair, that's always been the case. Watch any period drama and you can generally tell what decade it was made in.

The director herself said the same - that if you made a period drama in the 90s then it always looks like the 90s and I totally understand what she means. She admitted that this will look like a 2020s period film forever so she leaned into it.

In fact I always felt like both Leonardo DiCaprio with his boyband curtains and Kate Winslet had a previous version of "iPhone face" in Titanic whereas I could totally envision Billy Zane being around in the early 1900s.

Dev Patel was right there.

Nope. It looks bloody stupid. Don’t get the whole weird fascination with some random wet lettuce of a bloke shoving his fingers in your gob. Romantic? Yeah okay.

I wish Hollywood would stop being so bland, and I wish idiots would stop acting like this is somehow edgy. Talk about oxymoronic.

No it looks ghastly from the trailers

Nope. This is one film I won’t be watching. Eloise just looks like he’s got acromegaly to me and Catherine played by a blonde Hollywood bimbo is just crap.

Not my Catherine, not my Heathcliff. At all. Seems to have missed the mark on the wildness, cruelty and obsession.

I'll pass.

I don't like the story, it's all too sad. Watched it as a youngster, but never again

Looks like some sort of soft porn movie and not a good one.
Looks like they have went for shock value with the hanging scene and 'fingers' rather than a proper adaptation. Plus the ridiculous obsession tour they are doing.
Margot Robbie is too 'hollywood' polished to play Cathy as well.

Margot Robbie isn't a bimbo and she's Australian.

I think she's a bad choice for Catherine but th whole thing is one god-awful choice after another. That's at Fennell's door, not Robbie's

I have wonder if that was the case too, especially when you look at Mr Rochester’s ward Adele in Jane Eyre. I know she appears not to be Rochester’s child but…

Your view isn't wrong, words borrowed from other languages don't always keep the exact meaning. The same way that words can come to mean something quite different than they used to.

Typically "swarthy" means darker skinned in English, but not usually very dark like a person of South Asian or sub-Saharan African descent. My grandfather, who had French-Dutch roots, but in the summer was sometimes mistaken for a black man, was often described as swarthy, and that's a typical useage.

People's ideas about what that meant in the 18th and 19th centuries are not what they would be today. Someone from southern Europe could fit the bill just as easily, or someone from northern India, or an Anglo-Indian, among others, would fit the description just as well and are probably more likely.

Unlucky in your English teacher. I’m a retired one and my A level WH classes discussed this idea. It’s very plausible.

I find it more weird that they seem to always want to cast Cleopatra now as a black woman. I don't mind cross race casting in Shakespeare but some of the roles they seem to think are supposed to go to black actors don't make a lot of sense.

It's just as much of a construct as any of the older oddities of casting people complain about.

Agreed. With added nuance because Brontë is completely consciously commenting on class (and racial) divisions. It’s a very complex, layered book. Definitely not a love story.

I agree in that Hollywood finds it very easy to erase Middle Eastern and North African history.

I’m all for creating more roles for black actors, but not at the expense of even smaller minorities.

No because it looks awful.

I've always struggled with the book, being perfectly honest

@Arraminta I think that’s a reasonably common interpretation- that old Earnshaw had a love child. Not necessarily what Brontë intended but I’ve definitely read spin off type tales where that’s the case, and I think it’s implied in at least one film version of WH.

I am going to see it come what may - I also studied it for A level, with the bonus that I’d already read it a billion times over the preceding four years 😂

I am torn re the casting. When I first read the book tbh I thought it was a story mainly about racism and was surprised anyone thought differently! Racism, abuse and generational trauma, I guess. I was surprised anyone saw it as a love story.

That said, Heathcliff is described as looking Spanish at one point (I recalled this and looked back and checked!) and of course t he whole book is told by various unreliable narrators. Jacob Elordi being Basque (sorry I said Catalan up thread, my confusion) so not miles out. Not like the cast a Swedish actor!

On balance, I think it does miss a trick to cast a white (ish) actor as it misses a major theme in the book. But I hate saying this as I like colour blind casting when it’s bringing actors of colour into traditionally “white” roles.

Fennell has put "Wuthering Heights" in quotation marks - which apparently means she can do what she likes with it as it's her own interpretation!

I know she likes to explore the "dark side" of life - my quotation marks, which I interpret to mean gratuitous & squalid headline grabbing sleaze!

Yes. I think he would have been a really good casting choice.

The director whitewashed Heathcliff to make a shallow romance fanfic version of a very dark story.

From what I've seen, she goes for shock value rather than depth.

No, because Fennel is yet another nepobaby whose trademark is "shocking" the audience with cheap thrilla and I'm really bored of that.

Cleopatra was Greek, ethnically, not Middle Eastern or North African. A Greek woman could be played plausibly by all kinds of actors if they wanted it to be realistic.

Or if it's blind casting it could be anyone, but if that were the case they wouldn't be setting aside any roles for particular groups.