The Sources of Creation

The director Frances O’Connor, who already had an acting career among – other roles, she was the “mother” of the robot boy in Artificial intelligence, by Steven Spielberg – in a certain way promotes a new encounter between cinema and the novel O morro Wuthering Winds, by Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848), a book filmed several times and generally considered one of the great titles of literature in the English language. The most famous version was the one made in 1939 by the great William Wyler, a film that regularly appears on lists of the best films of all time and even found enthusiastic fans who placed it at the highest point of their preferences. There is another version signed by a filmmaker with prestige among critics, Luís Buñuel, shown in Brazil under the title of Escravos do rancor and made in 1950.

The filmmaker tries to approach the book, not making a version of it, but approaching the author’s life and trying to find connections between personal experiences and the situations she narrates. It is something to be highlighted, but it is not the only point of interest of a film that, having the title of Emily, makes its intention very clear. It is a work that, having this originality, also stands out for its precise direction and with really exceptional moments – among them that game of masks, which exposes fears and insecurities caused by an absence.

Emily’s sister Charlotte (1816 – 1855) also excelled as a writer and her novel Jane Eyre is likewise ranked among the great moments of English literature. A third sister, Anne (1820 – 1849) also left behind a novel, Agne Grey, which was praised but did not achieve the same fame. Her brother, Branwell, was characterized by rebelliousness and irreverence, but his writings did not emerge from obscurity. Even so, he is a central figure in the film, which has a script by the director herself. It is through him and his relationship with Emily that the director puts into play, and develops it with a series of variations, the theme of unfulfilled incest, but which has its desire exposed in several scenes, including that one – another admirable moment in the film – of the sheets, which despite being an erotic reference become a repressive barrier. Perhaps this scene originates from another famous moment in cinema, the one in which the protagonist of Ashes and Diamonds, by Andrzej Wajda, discovers that the end is near, something that, if governed by the unconscious, will certainly prove Frances right in exposing what he hides. can generate at the time of artistic creation.

What appears to be the great riddle is the subject of an attempt at resolution in O’Connor’s film. She seeks to answer how young people raised in an isolated environment and without major experiences managed to write works that stand out for relevant observations about human nature. In the case of the protagonist of the film, the frustrated passion for a religious endowed with imagination and refinement, and also a victim of repressive forces, reinforces, according to the filmmaker, that experiences and suffering find in a prisoner nature of the norms of behavior a path of liberation through from fantasy. The return of the character who, like an irate Ulysses, returns for revenge, in Wuthering Heights, something that Wyler accentuates in his film through a visual reference to Penelope, is manifested in Emily’s cruel criticism of the book that her brother is writing later. that your love frustration comes to fruition. The aggressiveness that arises from frustration, once contained, will be transformed into an apparently work of fiction. Frances O’Connor’s first film is another example of cinematic intelligence. She begins her story with the protagonist describing imaginary realms, and little by little she reveals that the imagination driven by dreams and daydreams is transfigured into works of another thickness and is directed to a universe where she finds fantasy and the desire to talk about a past, in which essential data accumulate so that relevant signals are properly interpreted and resolved. And the theme of rain, exposed by William Weightman as a unifying element, is accentuated in several scenes to give universality to the developed themes.