A disappointment: Buñuel's dull take on Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë's immortal novel is known to have had a especially strong following amidst the Surrealists, for whom the idea of a romantic subject was rather The Fall of the House of Usher than Romeo and Juliet. So, when former fellow comrade Luis Buñuel was in his Mexican period, they could finally -- but by all means just virtually -- put their hands on a Peter Ibbetson-kind of material and make it their own film. And it happened to be no other than Wuthering Heights, the ultimate amour fou drama.

Nonetheless, this movie may be the director's worst. It certainly is a heightened soap opera melodrama of sorts, as detached as can be, the more pretentious and vacuous adaptation of Wuthering Heights I'm able to conceive. Animals are harmed and the actors are bad, two situations that, regrettably (the first one in particular), are not strange at all to this master of cinema; but anything of the novel's fated passion hinted at in the Spanish title remains within these pedestrian limits. Furthermore, the storyline betrays in a literal way the spirit of Brontë's fiction, the faithful translation of which the foreword wants us to believe. The genius of Emily Brontë as a writer relied on the wild inventiveness of her imagination as well as on her tortuous Gothic form. By having changed some facts and traits in the characters that only at first sight might pass as unimportant, the very nature of the original work has suffered a transformation*. Hence, Heathcliff could still be Heathcliff under the different name of Alejandro, but the case is he's not himself anymore. To Buñuel's relief, not even Laurence Olivier conveys the antihero's authentic self in the fine and most celebrated screen version directed by William Wyler in 1939.

* A Wuthering Heights film produced in 1970 with Timothy Dalton in the lead features a similar plot-travesty issue, yet it refers itself during the credits as Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. However, this is otherwise a nicely crafted, worthy version, and Buñuel's manages to underline the flaw to its own detriment.