“Wuthering Heights”

The quotations around the title of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” warn literature devotees that the writer-director isn’t adapting Emily Brontë’s bleak 1847 novel about doomed lovers, per se. Rather, she’s just quoting certain aspects of it. What’s leftover is a revamping of well-worn material in the filmmaker’s sensibilities. So, it’s less a direct quote than a conversion from one piece of fiction to another, each with different motives and artistic agendas. That’s true of all adaptations, I suppose. However, the quotation marks seem inappropriate since they’re emphatic, and that’s a grammar no-no—quotes should repeat directly from a source, and that’s not what Fennell does here. Instead, let’s say the title comes with ironic air quotes. Her version alternates between a classical adaptation and a kind of horny, postmodern art piece. The story has been stripped down, leaving only stark, if expressively ornamented surfaces and aesthetic anachronisms that distract from rather than support the story. These modern touches underscore how Fennell, with her aversion to subtext and subtlety intact, speaks to an audience obsessed with outer layers and averse to interpreting their media.

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