Wuthering Heights (Rivette, 1985)

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Film Description

Aka Hurlevent. Rivette’s melancholic retelling of Emily Bronte’s classic love story Wuthering Heights (aka Hurlevent) sees the doomed lovers transported from the Yorkshire moors to 1930s France. The passionate and vengeful Heathcliff is now Roche (Lucas Belvaux – Madame Bovary) and Cathy becomes Catherine (Fabienne Babe – De Sueur Et Du Sang), and parts of the tragic tale have been streamlined and updated with Rivette’s own personal touch.

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Restored and remastered director's cut.

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Review by David Parkinson on 24th December 2007

Of the nouvelle vague auteurs schooled at the influential journal Cahiers du cinéma, Jacques Rivette has always been the least addicted to realism. As one critic put it, Rivette is fascinated by ‘the narrative function of mystery (and the mysterious function of narrative)’ and obsessed with ‘the theatre as the art which raises most directly questions about illusion and reality, lies and truth’. The nature of fiction and the extent to which a performer is psychologically affected by the search for the interiority of their character are certainly his key preoccupations in Love on the Ground (1984) and Gang of Four (1989).

However, in addition to revealing the mechanics of creativity, these films are also studies of the impact of intrusion upon an intimate coterie. Love on the Ground opens with a couple being surprised by an audience emerging from their bathroom having watched a play in a private apartment. Director Jean-Pierre Kalfon then persuades Geraldine Chaplin and Jane Birkin to act in his own production, which seems to be based on a love triangle involving Kalfon, his dead wife and magician André Dussollier. However, a climactic obtrusion further alters the group dynamic and we're left to ponder how far a work of fiction is influenced by the everyday life going on around it.

In Gang of Four, shady operator Benoît Régent has a similarly disruptive effect upon the four actresses struggling to come to terms with their characters in Bulle Ogier's interpretation of a Marivaux play. Recalling the link forged between theatre and political intrigue in Rivette's debut feature, Paris nous appartient (1961), this has been described as a summation of his cinematic career.

But Rivette brings this intellectual rigour and methodological ingenuity to every project he undertakes. Consequently, even such a supposedly atypical picture as Wuthering Heights (1985) confirms his conviction that text and performance are inextricably bound. Relocating the first part of Emily Brontë's novel to southern France in the 1930s, this is another tale of intrusion, as orphan Lucas Belvaux comes between Fabienne Babe and Olivier Torres, the brother who has just inherited the Hurlevant estate. Rarely has literature been so cinematic.

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