Wuthering Heights, Venice Film Festival

A film that’s not quite the full Brontë

Andrea Arnold clearly would not care to hear that her adaptation of Wuthering Heights met with befuddlement from the press at the Venice Film Festival. She has made a defiantly art-house adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic that is from the school of Robert Bresson rather than Merchant Ivory.

The camera is mostly hand-held and follows the protagonists around with the zeal of the Dardenne brothers. The acting, by mostly non-actors, is full of lines delivered with plenty of reserve. The sex scenes are raw and dirty. The weather is indeed wuthering but it's not as changing as the young Catherine (Shannon Beer), who goes through an ugly duckling transformation once she becomes a well-to-do wife (played as an adult by Kaya Scodelario).

Most surprisingly she has repackaged the story as a race drama. Her Heathcliff is a poor young black boy (Solomon Glave) who is treated like dirt by the white community tilling the Yorkshire Moors. It is easy to see her Heathcliff as a modern-day Barry Lyndon and making him black works best as a tool to allow Arnold to pare down the dialogue and tell the tale with minimal discourse. When Linton screams, "he's not my brother, he's a nigger," it's clear the outsider will never be accepted.

The soundtrack is peppered throughout with the blowing of the wind and chirping of birds. Arnold packs the scenes with so many shots of animals and plant life that at one point I wondered if the projectionist had accidentally put in a reel of the latest Attenborough documentary. Dogs, horses, insects, rabbits and slaughtered lambs are trotted out at the start of scenes, the middle of scenes and the ends of scenes, with symbolism that ranges from the too obvious to the beyond abstract.

There have only been glimpses in Red Road and Fish Tank of Arnold's desire to compare the emotional behaviour of humans with animals. The survival-of-the-fittest aspect is pushed to the edges in what is largely a picaresque tale of how Heathcliff's desire to better himself in a society hell bent on keeping him down leads to unhappiness and heartbreak.

What really fascinates is how Arnold has completely deprived the story of any romance. This is a story of emotional repression. The protagonists only realise the cost of love when it's way too late. When Heathcliff returns as an adult (James Howson) his motivations are as grey as the clouds. However, in pushing the story so far in this direction, Arnold has lost some of the magic of the text, which makes it far more difficult to have any emotional connection with the characters.