Brontë, spiritual biography of a tormented writer (score 6 ½ )- Corriere.it

One of the most «tumultuously romantic works in all of English literature» which interprets «the passions of men in the same way as the passions of nature» [Mario Praz], “Wuthering Heights» remains a unicum that continues to fascinate precisely because the poetic insights are stronger and more engaging than the pure novel structure (the protagonist, Heathcliffis the bearer of a evil at times excessive and even naive) and which reverberates its strength and complexity directly on its author, Emily Brontepenultimate of six children (five women and a boy, the first two died of tuberculosis at the age of nine and eleven) by an Irish pastor sent to preach in Yorkshire, in a remote parish in the heath whose wild desolation it is – according to scholars – at the origin of the fantastic charge of the novel. And this is where the actress and now debutant director Frances O’Connor started, to dig into the inspiration (more than into life) of the more mysterious of the Brontë sisters.

A tall bet, which probably requires one prior knowledge of the novel, but which also has some moments of undoubted charmwhen he “forces” the interpreter Emma Mackey to get lost in the elements of a hostile and indomitable nature – wind and water on everything – with which Emily seems to want to establish a mysterious symbiotic and pantheistic relationship. Like looking for asecret soul of things to which the future author would end up giving a literary form with her writing.

The film is built like a single, long flashback: opens with Emily, just turned 30, on her deathbed with her sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) who scolds her forimmorality and the wickedness of characters from his novel to close after 130 minutes at the scene of death. In the middle, more than a real biography, gods pictures of an existence which prompted her to build her own “heroic” moral, capable of making her accept and basically love a life that gave her little satisfaction. Definitely not the one to see his novel published with his name and appreciated as the film wants us to believe: like the slightly previous one “Agnes Grey” of his younger sister Anne (Amelia Gething) and just as soon after “Jane Eyre” of her older sister Charlotte, Emily’s too came out under male pseudonyms (Action, Currer and Ellis Bell), all three aware of the little consideration that a woman writer could have achieved.

The “falsification” of the film (which the director scripted alone) is perhaps intended to give more strength to the image of a woman who fight against social prejudices to find their own way, as well as the equally non-existent story with the young preacher William (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who can’t control his feelings of guilt for a passion that instead Emily lives with all her transport, seems to want to reiterate the female superiority also on the ground of acceptance of one’s feelings. Nothing particularly serious if her goal was to build a “spiritual biography” rather than a real one of the writer, but in the end the feeling of an artistic ambition not always supported by adequate staging choices.

Much better then the story of the controversial report with his brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), whose dreams as an artist – as a painter and as a writer – were not supported by a adequate talent and who, however, seems to be the only one in the family capable of appreciating Emily’s sensitivity and inciting her to cultivate it also from a literary point of view. But above all the strength of the film can be found in the work of director of photography Nanu Segal, who is not afraid to film many scenes in onegothic darknesscapable of making it almost palpable the torments that tear Emily’s soul apart, as in the disturbing pseudo-seance scene with the mother’s ghost.