wild child
by Douglas Messerli
Pascal
Bonitzer, Suzanne Schiffman, and Jacques Rivette (screenplay, based on one
chapter from the novel by Emily Brontë), Jacques Rivette (director) Hurlevent (Wuthering Heights) / 1985
There
often seems to be two Jacques Rivettes, one a highly innovative film-maker, the
second, a far more conservative cinematographer of classics such as The Duchess of Langeasis and the movie I
watched yesterday, Wuthering Heights.
I like both of the director’s sides, however, and from time to time, even in
his more conservative fare, we recognize the postmodern sensibility behind it.
Although the servant, even in the original
novel, is an important figure, one who not only observes and judges those her
around, but has a role in their behavior, in Rivette she becomes, perhaps the
central figure, a kind of mother and father, and for Guillaume, a hostage-wife.
Hélène (earthily portrayed by Sandra Montaigu) is the one person to whom all
the others can turn for help, and it is because those needs are so varied that
she sometimes appears to further harm those around rather than placate them. Yet,
she is the only one who can calm them, and who, at times, holds them together.
Whatever little civilized behavior exists on the farm is established by her
tireless actions, cooking, cleaning, listening, loving. There is hardly a
moment in the film when she is not busy, while the teenagers run into nature
and Guillaume falls into a drunken stupor each night.
Obviously,
all who live in this ancient stone farmhouse are outsiders, a fact which the
director makes obvious when the two wild children come upon a couple of wealthy
children playing tennis. It is as if, suddenly, they have witnessed a “brave
new world,” which is precisely what it is: a world of wealth, leisure, and
class bigotry. It is a world of traps, of pretense and lies, symbolized, in
Rivette’s telling, by Catherine’s foot being immediately caught in an animal
trap. One of the first lines from Madame Lindon’s mouth, as they carry the girl
onto the terrace, is to command them not to lay her on the lawn chair since she
will get it dirty. Roch is not even permitted to stay on the patio, but forced
to leave at once.
It may be, in part, jealousy that leads
Catherine to insist that her sister-in-law stay away from Roch; but she is also
perceptive in that Roch is now a cruel manipulator who does not only destroy
his brother Guillaume, but will brutalize and rape Catherine’s sister-in-law
out of revenge. In his new mien he has become like the Lindon’s, something
beautiful on the outside, but rotten within.
Between the extremes, once more,
Catherine is trapped, caught up in a rivalry that does really concern itself
with whom she truly is. Perhaps by setting his Hurlevent in the 1930s, Rivette is hinting at the dark whirling
winds rising throughout Europe which would destroy nearly anything that truly
was good. Rivette’s Roch has so changed, in fact, that he cannot actually
return to Catherine’s bedside, the way Hearthcliff does. Rivette calls him in
up in Catherine’s dying imagination in a dream, and at the sight of him, she dies.
Roch is now part of the brewing storm, just as, in their class and social
bigotries, is Olivier, the two women in their lives having been destroyed.
In an interview with Rivette, film writer
Valérie Hazette decried the fact that the director did not continue with the
later sections of the novel. To do, however, would have robbed him of his
theme. Roch is already dead when Catherine dies in Rivette’s telling. No longer
a “wild child,” he is now an uncontrollable beast for whom not even her memory
can bring redemption.
Los Angeles, March
9, 2014
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