Within the trailer, Robbie is seen performing some extremely suggestive breadmaking, her cheeks flushed and her bodice heaving, as she remembers Elordi’s bare torso. Then there are pictures of a corset being pulled tight, of Elordi stripping off his shirt, and, errm, somebody placing their finger in a fish’s mouth. A typical response to all this lust and lewdness was an article in The Spinoff entitled “Everybody hates the brand new Wuthering Heights trailer, and here is why”. “Fennell is taking a chunk of artwork and decreasing it to its dullest kind”, wrote Clare Mabey.
There have been loads of points apart from the overt eroticism, too. The trailer was aggressively anachronistic, with Charli XCX on the soundtrack, and Cathy sporting a white marriage ceremony gown which, in response to Vogue, “appeared as if it was extra befitting of the Nineteen Eighties than the early 1800s”. And when a clip from the movie was launched final month, the actors themselves had been derided for being anachronistic. “They absolutely had nice dentists again then,” mentioned one touch upon YouTube. “Love Margot, however she appears to be like like she’s about to drag an iPhone out at any second,” mentioned one other.
The explanations for the rancour
However these quibbles elevate some large questions, the primary one being: So what? Why should not Fennell give you her personal out-there, sexed-up model of Wuthering Heights? If Clueless can put a Jane Austen plot in Nineties California, and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet can do the identical with Shakespeare, why ought to we be fussing about gown design?
There are two apparent solutions, one in every of them advised by the truth that, within the trailer, Robbie’s Cathy sounded posher than any display character since, nicely, the toffs in Saltburn.
Fennell’s final movie, Saltburn, was set in a stately house, and probably the greatest issues about it was that the writer-director appeared to know her upper-class characters intimately. There isn’t a thriller as to how she managed it: because the daughter of celebrated jewelry designer Theo Fennell, she grew up in gilded circles. To cite Patrick Sproull in Dazed, “Not lots of 18-year-olds have their party photographed by Tatler and attended by a Delevingne, a number of Guinness heirs, a number of members of the the Aristocracy and the daughter of Sting.” Briefly, Fennell is posh. Certainly, her background is so privileged that when she acted in The Crown as Camilla Parker-Bowles – now higher generally known as Queen Camilla – she did not need to sound any grander than she does in odd life.
