Buñuel channels Brontë’s novel with striking fidelity. Although truncated to focus on Alejandro’s (Heathcliff) return, the spirit of damned and hate-fueled passion brews with as much fury as its source material.
But that’s kind of the problem. As one who is suspicious of Brontë’s work, the weaknesses are its primary attributes. The thing about the novel, and this movie… there is no interior. That’s what I hated about the book. There’s no substance to any character’s motivation. What’s so funny about art, narratively-driven art, specifically, is that authors get to write whatever and it’s… “true.” So when Isabel falls in love and marries Alejandro, we must accept it. Even within the movie, Catalina sensibly questions Isabela’s instantaneous evolution of love for Alejandro. But this happens in the book too. It’s flooring and galling. How can this character be so naive? We, the audience/reader, are coerced into going with the tumultuous emotional flow despite being devoid of any logic. But that’s what the opening crawl text guarantees.
It further frustrates me in how helpless and relentless the suffering is. But it’s all so self-propelling and self-condeming. The film takes place in a vaccuum where characters explode with, cling to, live and breathe extreme melodrama. Take Eduardo’s first jealous breakdown as he buries his face into his bourgeois pillows lamenting the love his wife has for Alejandro.
Watching the melodrama here reminded me of when I was a kid and my grandma would watch Days of Our Lives. Then I got it. Not that I liked it, to be clear. But some people like this inexplicable vaccuum of passion. I’m logic-obsessed and also probably at least a little autistic, so this abstract ubiquitous level of emotion is distancing, understandable only at an academic level. I should probably reiterate it is the void of internal dialogue/motivation which creates such unfamiliarity between all the characters and myself.
Buñuel is not without his own charm and genius though. While faithful to the retelling, he skillfully infuses his own surrealist slant. There is a scene of Ricardo tossing a moth into a spider web. Imo, no moment, in even the book, is as potent as this to the central macro-representative themes.
Buñuel sorta saves all his personally flavoured genius for the end. If the spider scene wasn’t enough, the literal ending crystallizes the “true” spirit of the story. It’s the biggest departure from the novel, but it also elevates Alejandro and Catalina’s central romance. It finally does something for the characters which broaches anything beyond suffocating solipsism. Where Brontë, for me, never escaped the trappings of flawed secondhand narration, Buñuel ends with a visualized interior of destined damnation.
Buñuel channels Brontë’s novel with striking fidelity. Although truncated to focus on Alejandro’s (Heathcliff) return, the spirit of damned and hate-fueled passion brews with as much fury as its source material.
But that’s kind of the problem. As one who is suspicious of Brontë’s work, the weaknesses are its primary attributes. The thing about the novel, and this movie… there is no interior. That’s what I hated about the book. There’s no substance to any character’s motivation. What’s so funny about art, narratively-driven art, specifically, is that authors get to write whatever and it’s… “true.” So when Isabel falls in love and marries Alejandro, we must accept it. Even within the movie, Catalina sensibly questions Isabela’s instantaneous evolution of love for Alejandro. But this happens in the book too. It’s flooring and galling. How can this character be so naive? We, the audience/reader, are coerced into going with the tumultuous emotional flow despite being devoid of any logic. But that’s what the opening crawl text guarantees.
It further frustrates me in how helpless and relentless the suffering is. But it’s all so self-propelling and self-condeming. The film takes place in a vaccuum where characters explode with, cling to, live and breathe extreme melodrama. Take Eduardo’s first jealous breakdown as he buries his face into his bourgeois pillows lamenting the love his wife has for Alejandro.
Watching the melodrama here reminded me of when I was a kid and my grandma would watch Days of Our Lives. Then I got it. Not that I liked it, to be clear. But some people like this inexplicable vaccuum of passion. I’m logic-obsessed and also probably at least a little autistic, so this abstract ubiquitous level of emotion is distancing, understandable only at an academic level. I should probably reiterate it is the void of internal dialogue/motivation which creates such unfamiliarity between all the characters and myself.
Buñuel is not without his own charm and genius though. While faithful to the retelling, he skillfully infuses his own surrealist slant. There is a scene of Ricardo tossing a moth into a spider web. Imo, no moment, in even the book, is as potent as this to the central macro-representative themes.
Buñuel sorta saves all his personally flavoured genius for the end. If the spider scene wasn’t enough, the literal ending crystallizes the “true” spirit of the story. It’s the biggest departure from the novel, but it also elevates Alejandro and Catalina’s central romance. It finally does something for the characters which broaches anything beyond suffocating solipsism. Where Brontë, for me, never escaped the trappings of flawed secondhand narration, Buñuel ends with a visualized interior of destined damnation.
