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.

Directors: Luis Buñuel

The love-hate relationship I have with the genius from Calanda actually compels me to make a somewhat annotated post!

Film I love: La hija del engaño (1951): This Mexican entry was my first Buñuel ever --even if I may have watched Gran Casino before. It got me in a trance (and hooked on Buñuel forever, for better and worse); one feverish, delirious melodrama, with a edge-of-your-seat, very page-turning kind of pace to it. I precisely remember it as a hell of a melodrama/serial-type, and it's one of those revered movies I won't revisit for fear of not getting at all what they gave me the first and only perfect time they opened my eyes.

Film I like: Belle de jour (1967)

Film I almost hate: Simón del desierto (1965): Silvia Pinal is a very tempting devil, but kicking a poor little lamb out of the frame like a soccer player is absolutely not my idea of art, no matter how much good-looking the actress' legs are! Something Buñuel never understood and will always be the main thing which, for me, essentially detracts from the otherwise excellent quality of his craft.

The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

This 1955 Buñuel is somehow strangely one of his most personal works, a film that communicates the ease of bourgeois leisure in spite of its low-budget production. Besides the blatantly black humor and the rotund female-legs fetishism, there is a sense of irony that ultimately gives the Wildesque plot an ambivalent gravitas. Archibaldo de la Cruz' murderous desires --so highly and impersonally effective-- must have delighted Hitchcock as Tristana's amputated leg would do 15 years later. 8/10