20/10/2022 - Actress Frances O’Connor makes a passionate but flawed first directorial effort with this fictionalised chronicle of the Wuthering Heights author’s life

Emily Brontë’s sole novel, Wuthering Heights, has inspired countless filmed adaptations, notably by great European filmmakers working in their own language, such as Luis Buñuel and Jacques Rivette, not to mention Andrea Arnold’s almost-punk 2011 version, Wuthering Heights [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Andrea Arnold
film profile]. Actual dramatisations of the Brontës’ mythically isolated lives have been rarer, but present: in the early days of his career, Andre Téchiné made the biographical The Brontë Sisters, retaining the windswept Yorkshire setting, whilst Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert and Marie-France Pisier played the sisters speaking in French. Rather than just piggybacking on the ready-made structure of a great story, these directors seemed driven to restage it from their point of view, as if it would somehow get closer to solving the aching sense of mystery and fascination that foxes nearly every reader of it.

For Emily [+see also:
trailer
film profile], her filmmaking debut after decades of sturdy acting work (including a brush with prime Hollywood roles at the turn of the millennium), Frances O’Connor has been spurred on by a similar motivation in tackling this biographical drama on the middle Brontë sister’s life. Rather than yet another bonneted and mud-hewn run-through of Wuthering Heights’ key plot points, or rigidly cleaving to the real-life chronology and dates, O’Connor approaches her film in the manner of what, in the publishing world, is called a “critical biography”, aiming to make persuasive observations from the known facts, so we might further understand how Wuthering Heights came screaming into the world. The movie premiered as the opening film of Toronto’s Platform strand and is currently wending its way through an impressive slate of autumn European festivals, the most recent of which being the Sitges Film Festival. It is also now on general release in the UK.

Films that depict the process of writing are notoriously difficult to excel with, yet O’Connor also dodges quite a corny alternative that many filmmakers succumb to, whereby certain life events match up 1:1 with their counterparts in the fictional text (David Fincher’s Mank, an account of the writing of Citizen Kane, was surprisingly reliant on this). Emily Jane (rising Franco-British actress Emma Mackey) is the second-youngest of an unruly brood making their home in a Haworth parsonage, with the Byronic Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) and the studious Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) her seniors, and Anne (Amelia Gething) the youngest and most unassuming (and given another posthumous oversight here, even as commentators have acclaimed her own literary work as the most feminist of the three sisters’). Emily’s progress, familial relationships and romantic entanglements with the studly new curate Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) are rendered by O’Connor as the turbulent matter of life that can often only be processed by writing about it, for some therapeutic or cathartic respite. The troubled, opium-addicted Branwell is an especially well-realised figure, putting Emily’s own antisocial struggles in stark relief, and creating a kindred spirit to nurture her (capital-R) Romantic view of the world. Branwell has “Freedom in Thought” tattooed in scrawly black letters on his lower arm, and the two of them bellow these words across the moors in a sequence that avoids the cringing sincerity of these outbursts, from similarly young and free spirits, in other films.

Emily occasionally suffers from a degree of overstatement, and might’ve benefited from a surer editorial and structural hand. And whilst it gladly doesn’t over-emphasise connections between the author’s life and her work, Emily’s invented relationship with Weightman is, accidentally true to his name, given disproportionate weight in the narrative, and we can start to feel O’Connor’s indecision over which character to ascribe Heathcliff-like attributes to (referring to the tragic anti-hero of the novel), as the screenplay struggles to fully nail its crucial third act. Yet O’Connor has created a robust achievement here that stirs passion in its own right, and will find a deserving place in the centuries-long afterlife of Brontë appreciation and scholarship.

Emily is a UK-Australian co-production, staged by Tempo Productions Limited and Arenamedia. Its world sales are handled by Embankment Films.