“Wuthering Heights” is fifty shades of Earl Grey tea

0:03One of the most hotly anticipated films is hitting cinemas this Saturday. I'll give you a clue It features two Australians, the Yorkshire Moors and an original Charlie XCX album as its soundtrack I of course am talking about the latest adaptation of Wuthering Heights Hi and welcome back to The Standard Podcast If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk Coming up, Wuthering Heights, 50 shades of Earl Grey tea

0:39Hollywood superstars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi star in Emerald Fennell's sizzling adaptation of Emily Bronte's canonic novel. And the critics are divided. In today's episode, I speak to The Standards Culture and Lifestyle editor, India Block, for her hot take of the film that is blowing hot, cold and very windy for critics. So, joining me now is India Block, the standards culture lifestyle editor. Thanks so much for joining me on the standard podcast. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Well, I want to hear your hot take at the top of this. So the Telegraph, their top line is bosom heavy, gasp inducing thrill ride.

1:26The Times have gone with like Bronte Barbie. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, has gone for too hot, too greedy. Inia, what's your top line review of the film? My working headline at the moment is this is Fifty Shades of Earl Grey Tea. It's far more Bridgerton bodice ripper than BDSM. It does strip away a lot of the gothic and focuses heavily on the romance, which I think is why it makes sense for the 14th of February release date. This is very much catering to the Valentine's Day audience. The get together with your girls, having a boyfriend is embarrassing now. We're all going to go to the cinema with bottles of Prosecco in our handbags and watch this together and scream.

2:13Emerald for now has basically been edging us all for a year with kind of breathless drops of information that everyone has been losing their minds over. So I think now that it's finally out, everyone is just sort of releasing a collective breath. Releasing something. Yeah, a lot of things being released here. Maybe it is Bronte Barbie and we don't need to be ashamed of it. Oh no, I think the Barbie element is actually key to this because Catherine has a lot of dolls. She is eventually made into a doll and placed within this doll's house. And Emerald Fennell has been very clear about this, that this isn't a pure adaptation.

2:51This is an adaptation of how she felt when she was 14 years old reading this novel. So a lot of the complex parts of the book, the kind of endless goings on about inheritance and property ownership, that's all gone. We don't have to worry about that at all. We don't even have this sort of narrative within a narrative. And it's only volume one of the novel. So we are only looking at Catherine and Heathcliff and how they grew up together and their sort of tortured, obsessive romance. So for people that maybe skipped this book in school or haven't seen one of the other many adaptations of this story, could you just take us through a kind of blurb -like synopsis of the film?

3:45Okay, yeah. So Wuthering Heights is one of the books written by the Bronte sisters. So you've got Charlotte Bronte with Jane Eyre, and then Emily Bronte writes Wuthering Heights. She's writing early to mid-1800s, but it's set in the past. It was a period novel at the time, and it is moving between different time periods. These two families whose fates are kind of intertwined, and there's multiple generations. So you have Catherine Earnshaw. She is sort of a faded landed gentry growing up in this very miserable, squalid, faded grandeur of the heights. The wuthering part is the weather. The weather is a character here.

4:30It's in Yorkshire. The wind is blowing. The storms are raging when Heathcliff was young and was brought to live at the heights. he's adopted as sort of a foster son by this family and then they sort of grow up running wild on the moors and Heathcliff is kind of bullied because Edgar Linton the sort of neighbouring family that live in a much fancier estate they gang up on Heathcliff Heathcliff and Kathy go to visit the Lintons at some point get attacked by the dogs and Catherine stays with the Linton family to recuperate. When she comes back to the Heights, she has been domesticated. She's become a lady and she is wooed by Edgar Linton.

5:13She realises that her heart will always belong to Heathcliff, but he is a sort of now a servant sort of plucked from the streets and they're very poor. And she sort of accepts Linton's proposal, isn't very happy about it. Heathcliff comes back a couple of years later he is mysteriously wealthy we never find out the source of his wealth um catherine is overjoyed and also furious they embark on a sort of emotional affair all the while torturing each other heathcliff decides the best way to get revenge on catherine and on edgar linton is to marry isabella who is uh in the book edgar's sister he marries her carries her off back to the heights is absolutely horrible to her and there's a lot of sort of marital rape happening in the film Isabella is like an absolute freak for ribbons and pet play and he chains her up in the fireplace and she's having a grand old time so I hear I hear there's there's lots of uh licking uh yeah it's kind of it's not as extreme I think as it's being made out to be.

6:24There's no nudity. There's a lot of sort of heavy breathing sex, but no one takes their clothes off. Lots of people like sticking fingers in each other's mouths or in places they shouldn't be in terms of food. Lots of sort of imagery, but Catherine's sexual awakening happens when she sees two servants going at it in the barn using sort of all of the horse equipment as props. We'll take a quick break. Coming up, India and I chat about the fantastical aesthetics of the film and, of course, Charlie XCX's soundtrack. And we share recommendations for London cinemas that complement the sensuous styling of the film.

7:17Welcome back. Let's get right back to my chat with India. So Saltburn, Emerald Fennell's previous film, phenomenal film. I love that film. And particularly the set dressing, the art direction, I thought was just incredible. I think it really captured a moment in time. Did you find the kind of the visual aspects of the film as detail-oriented as Saltburn? Was there a kind of Shondaland fantasy element? is it more Baz Luhrmann did any visual elements feel authentic to the period or oh yeah I think Baz Luhrmann is actually probably the best analogy it's very stylized you can tell this was filmed on a sound stage things are exaggerated you know the heights are horrible and squalid and dark and disgusting and then the Linton house is this beautiful sort of doll's house with mirrored rooms and Edgar builds Catherine a bedroom that's sort of wallpapered, he says, in the colour of his wife's skin but it's actually these kind of almost cushioned flesh walls that have veins and freckles.

8:31Like a weird womb. Yeah, it's very sort of fantastical, almost Tim Burton-esque. You know, this is not a direct serious period adaptation. Again, I think it's Jacqueline Duran has done the costuming and it's not period attire, it's riffing on it. It is a sort of fervid, sort of hot, moist, like teenage girls imagination. and there are a lot of scenes, especially within the Linton household, where Margot Robbie is wearing some very Barbie-like dresses, especially her sort of peignoirs, her nightgowns. They're very sort of 90s polyester, holographic fabric almost. So I think that casting is actually very deliberate.

9:26Her wedding dress is beautiful, but it's white. Obviously, women weren't getting married and white at that time. They'd have just been wearing a sort of Sunday best dress, even if you're fabulously wealthy. But they put her in a big white dress with a huge long veil and have her walking across the moors as she kind of transitions from the heights to Thornton, Heath, Robbie's costumes look like very modern interpretations, sort of dirndls, leather corsets, It's these sort of tiny steampunk glasses they all wear. To get like too nerdy into it, it's very interesting that Jacob Lordy's been cast. You know, he's currently getting a lot of attention for playing literal Frankenstein's monster.

10:09So another like gothic novel. So Edgar Linton is played by Shehzad Latif, who has been in Penny Dreadful. So also another gothic sort of stalwart. and he played Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And so he's kind of got this very edgy dual personality. The costumes and the set are also doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of placing this in more of a fantasy, imagination, almost fan fiction world. I think we're talking a little bit of a step up from Bridgerton. It's not just throw a load of sort of bedazzling on it, but it's not quite sort of Gilberto Toro levels. It's kind of crimson peaky, but hasn't pushed sort of aesthetically that hard.

10:59I think it's still kind of going for sort of sexy imaginations of everything. Speaking of sexy imaginations of everything, this leads very nicely to the next question. We have to talk about the soundtrack. 365 Party Girl, Charlie XCX she wrote an original soundtrack for this film how did you find the music worked with the kind of narrative? I think it actually worked pretty well again because they've been drip feeding us content for want of a better word I'm really excited that she's moving into sort of film and also the way she's pushed herself sonically I also love some like death metal and doomcore She's really pushing into sort of interesting sounds.

11:48The I think I'm going to die in this house has been in my head for so long and it really works for like soundtracking. People are doing a lot of riding horses dramatically across the moors. There is some vocal work from someone that I don't think is Charlie and it sounds more kind of traditional folk. and I think it's interesting to have original music made for a project that isn't sort of necessarily one of your big sort of like Hans Zimmer or Max Richter. I mean, I love what Max Richter did with Hamnet, but sort of leaning back on those classical music tracks that we are pre-programmed to be like, oh yes, we're watching a period drama and this is the point where the leads fall in love.

12:35So I think that is fresh and exciting. And so would you class the film as a romance film? 100%, yeah. This is a tragic love story. You know, if you want the true gothic, you're going to have to go with like an Eggers film. You're going to have to just re-watch Lily Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgård in Nosferatu. If you want something that's really exploring BDSM dynamics and you're going to want to watch Pillion with another Skarsgård, Alexander, I think if you enjoyed sort of Emma or the Pride and Prejudice adaptations, but you think you're a little bit edgier, this is what you want. It's very much a sort of torrid love story between two awful people who sort of ruin everyone else's lives and each other in the process, but have a lot of fun doing it.

13:28So yeah, I guess it's like the anti-Valentine's Day film. and where would you suggest watching this film in London I mean which cinema would complement such a visual and aural experience yeah I think this is a really interesting question I'm a huge sort of picture house fan so I think like a picture house and every man you know maybe the Rio in Dalston something that's got a bit of that sort of velvet seats velvet as a recurring metaphor You want ideally one of those sort of sofa seats where it's sort of double. You want somewhere where you can bring in a bottle of wine. Maybe the cinema in Selfridges.

14:11I haven't been there, but that might be a good one. You know, I don't even know if it's on at the IMAX. I think this might be a bit of a weird one to watch in the IMAX. Do you think more of an intimate kind of plush setting? Yeah, yeah. You probably still have a good time if you see it in like a view or an Odeon, but I don't think that's going to give you the same sort of atmosphere. Well, thank you so much for chatting all things Wuthering Heights with me, India. And that's The Standard. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. If you'd like to get in touch, email us at podcasts at standard.co.uk.

14:46We'll be back here tomorrow morning. See you then.