“Stormwind”: the turbulent child of Baz Lurhmann and Sofia Coppola (review)

Excessive, noisy, the adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel by Emerald Fennell ends up seducing by imposing with force its aesthetic fueled by Instagram and dark romance.

Even before the first image, we understand that Emerald Fennell will not do lace. On a black screen, a death rattle is heard, which we do not immediately understand whether it is of agony or pleasure. Then the first scene reveals to us that the cries are those of a man being hanged in a public square, overcome by an erection as he takes his last breath. In the audience, little Catherine Earnshaw, eternal heroine of Wuthering Heightsattends astounded at this barbaric celebration mixing sex and death. Then the child goes running in the moor to the background of Charli concept art abandoned by Tim Burton on the corner of a table…

Welcome to Stormwind, welcome to “Stormwind” (note the quotation marks, a way of saying that the adaptation will not be very scrupulous), a hyperbolic, noisy and proud version of Emily Brontë’s novel, a masterpiece that has traveled to all states and all latitudes, adapted among others to the classic Hollywood (by William Wyler, 1939), Mexican (Luis Bunuel, 1954), Nouvelle Vague (Rivette, 1986), Japanese (Yoshishige Yoshida, 1988), feverish British (Andrea Arnold, 2011), until, therefore, today suffering the outrages of Emerald Fennell, director of rape and revenge fluorescent Promising Young Woman and the little feeling Saltburna neo-Theorem gently flirtatious.

Brontë’s book crosses time and lends itself to all aesthetics and all betrayals, this is what the filmmaker intends to demonstrate by considering the impossible love story between Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and the darkly handsome Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) as a sort of maximalist hyper-pop opera – less a film than a collection of images saturated with dazzling colors, sartorial anachronisms, ostentatious decor, which give the impression that each photogram was designed to be isolated, liked or commented on on Instagram or TikTok. But this whirlwind manages in places to be truly intoxicating. Margot Robbie plays a quivering Catherine, in a classically romantic tradition, but it is Jacob Elordi who best adapts to the neo-Clippesque art of Emerald Fennell, allowing himself to be filmed like an offspring of Delon or Terence Stamp, placidly accepting his destiny as a human meme, captured in almost each of his appearances in a pose with high erogenous and viral potential. After being an Elvis Presley Bluebeard in Priscilla and Frankenstein’s monster for Guillermo del Toro, the actor ofEuphoria refines his gallery of nightmare creatures with Heathcliff.

Emerald Fennell said while promoting the film that she loved it Wuthering Heights when she read it for the first time at 14 and, beyond all the criticisms that could be made against her (notably that of “whitewasher” Heathcliff, described in the book as having “dark skin”), we can be seduced by the way in which she seems here to want to do justice to the adolescent experience of her discovery of the novel – which perhaps explains why she misses a more political reading of the story, or that she has applied a flashy aesthetic that is sometimes frankly questionable. The undertaking may seem superficial but it is nevertheless intensely personal, right down to the director’s almost childish taste for organicity, the sticky materials and the dirty images which punctuate the film (eggs crushed on the protagonists’ mattresses, leeches, snail slime, etc.), and above all, in her exalted explanation of the sadomasochistic dimension of the story, which sees her display SM imagery in all tones, from the initial hanging to these corsets tightened too tightly, including the enslavement of poor Isabelle (Alison Oliver). What interests Fennell is pain, and she manages to make that of the characters resonate quite powerfully at the end of the film, despite the barnum that surrounds them.

Fennell’s adolescence was at the end of the 90s, the time of the first successes of Baz Luhrmann and Sofia Coppola (who spread the cultural heritage of their pop obsessions), but also of the modernized adaptations of Jane Austen (Clueless) or Dangerous Liaisons (Sex Intentions). It is undoubtedly these films, themselves nourished by MTV and Aaron Spelling’s bling-bling TV series, that Fennell was thinking of when making his “Stormwind”reformulating their codes for a generation drenched in dark romance and of Chronicle of the Bridgertons. Much of the beauty and depth of Emily Brontë’s story is lost, but the approach is perhaps not as cynical as one might think. It’s a stubborn and unreasonable way of remaining faithful to your teenage emotions.

“Wolfwind”by Emerald Fennell, with Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau… At the cinema on February 11.