It’s 9:15 on a Wednesday evening and I am sitting on a sofa at the front of the cinema (because I like a fancy cinema these days) hugging my friend and literally sobbing, yes we have just watched Wuthering Heights or should I say Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. It is now Saturday and I am reading the book and digesting as much on social media as I can on the film. I am quite appropriately obsessed.
I would have viewed this film very differently 6 months ago but I have spent the winter researching women’s history and the nature of feminity and this film was the visual to the content of my mind. A film by a women for the feminine side of the human experience.
We think these days that the feminine is pretty, young, delicate,arty maybe a bit bitchy, a feminist possibly but we have forgotten and society has largely erased the true nature of the female that I have found in history. This side is not just about women, it is present in men and women, we may call it left brain and right brain, ying and Yang. It is the flow, the mystical, the dream, the nurturer, the chaos, the big feelings, it is the person who holds space for all of this without controlling it, it is the watcher of birth and death. It is slugs crawling down windows, indefinable love and running over bleak but beautiful mores. All of this has been largely missing from our world for too long.
So while I am sitting in the cinema lapping up every second of this wonderful film, a little part of me is doing a tiny celebratory dance. The characters are all absolutely in this other energy, Cathy doesn’t hide her emotions even when they are illogical, Nelly is wonderful in her conflicted love and hate and I think the switch in Isabella from victim to master is surprising and fits exactly in this side ways world. Love is also different here, more delicate. The scene where Heathcliff shelters Cathy’s eyes from the rain has been all over social media and the sex is not all boobs and nudity it is not for the audience but for the story. Heathcliff is entirely present, hiding Cathy’s eyes from things she is maybe not ready to see and repeating I love you I love you I love you.
On a personal level this film felt like it was made for me, a woma and contained so much of what I feel is missing from the world. It also gave me the chance to have a big old cry and hug with my gorgeous friend on a Wednesday evening and who doesn’t love that!
Rewilding my family 