Hurlevent
Tags: romantic

Plot synopsis:
=== Opening (Chapters 1 to 3) ===
In 1801, Lockwood, a wealthy young man from the South of England who is seeking peace and recuperation, rents Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire. He visits his landlord, Heathcliff, who lives in a remote moorland farmhouse, Wuthering Heights. There Lockwood finds an odd assemblage: Heathcliff seems to be a gentleman, but his manners are uncouth; the reserved mistress of the house is in her mid-teens; and a young man who seems to be a member of the family, yet dresses and speaks as if he is a servant.
Snowed in, Lockwood is grudgingly allowed to stay and is shown to a bedchamber where he notices books and graffiti left by a former inhabitant named Catherine. He falls asleep and has a nightmare in which he sees the ghostly Catherine trying to enter through the window. He cries out in fear, rousing Heathcliff, who rushes into the room. Lockwood is convinced that what he saw was real. Heathcliff, believing Lockwood to be right, examines the window and opens it, hoping to allow Catherine's spirit to enter. When nothing happens, Heathcliff shows Lockwood to his own bedroom and returns to keep watch at the window.
At sunrise, Heathcliff escorts Lockwood back to Thrushcross Grange. Lockwood asks the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, about the family at Wuthering Heights, and she tells him the tale.
=== Heathcliff's childhood (Chapters 4 to 17) ===
Thirty years earlier, the owner of Wuthering Heights is Mr. Earnshaw, who lives with his son Hindley and younger daughter Catherine. On a trip to Liverpool, Earnshaw encounters a homeless boy, described as a "dark-skinned gypsy in aspect". He adopts the boy and names him Heathcliff. Hindley feels that Heathcliff has supplanted him in his father's affections and becomes bitterly jealous. Catherine and Heathcliff become friends and spend hours each day playing on the moors. They grow close.
Hindley is sent to college. Three years later Earnshaw dies and Hindley becomes the landowner; he is now master of Wuthering Heights. He returns to live there with his new wife, Frances. He allows Heathcliff to stay but only as a servant, and regularly mistreats him.
A few months after Hindley's return, Heathcliff and Catherine walk to Thrushcross Grange to spy on Edgar and Isabella Linton, who live there. After being discovered they try to run away but are caught. Catherine is injured by the Lintons' dog and taken into the house to recuperate, while Heathcliff is sent home. Catherine stays with the Lintons. The Lintons are landed gentry and Catherine is influenced by their fine appearance and genteel manners. When she returns to Wuthering Heights her appearance and manners are more ladylike, and she laughs at Heathcliff's unkempt appearance. The next day, knowing that the Lintons are to visit, Heathcliff, upon Nelly's advice, tries to dress up, in an effort to impress Catherine, but he and Edgar Linton get into an argument and Hindley humiliates Heathcliff by locking him in the attic. Catherine tries to comfort Heathcliff, but he vows revenge on Hindley.
The following year, Frances Earnshaw gives birth to a son, named Hareton, but she dies a few months later. Hindley descends into drunkenness. Two more years pass, and Catherine and Edgar Linton become friends, while she becomes more distant from Heathcliff. Edgar visits Catherine while Hindley is away and they declare themselves lovers soon afterwards.
Catherine confesses to Nelly that Edgar has proposed marriage and she has accepted, although her love for Edgar is not comparable to her love for Heathcliff, whom she cannot marry because of his low social status and lack of education. She hopes to use her position as Edgar's wife to raise Heathcliff's standing. Heathcliff overhears her say that it would "degrade" her to marry him (but not how much she loves him), and he runs away and disappears without a trace. Distraught over Heathcliff's departure, Catherine makes herself ill. Nelly and Edgar begin to pander to her every whim to prevent her from becoming ill again.
Three years pass. Edgar and Catherine marry and go to live together at Thrushcross Grange, where Catherine enjoys being "lady of the manor". Six months later, Heathcliff returns, now a wealthy gentleman. Catherine is delighted, but Edgar is not. Edgar's sister, Isabella, soon falls in love with Heathcliff, who despises her, but encourages the infatuation as a means of revenge. One day, he embraces Isabella, leading to an argument with Edgar. Upset, Catherine locks herself in her room and begins to make herself ill again.
Heathcliff takes up residence at Wuthering Heights and spends his time gambling with Hindley and teaching Hareton bad habits. Hindley dissipates his wealth and mortgages the farmhouse to Heathcliff to pay his debts. Heathcliff elopes with Isabella Linton. Two months after their elopement, they return to Wuthering Heights, where Heathcliff hears that Catherine is dying. With Nelly's help, he visits Cathy secretly. However, Catherine is pregnant. The following day, she gives birth to a daughter, Cathy, shortly before dying.
After Catherine's funeral, Isabella confides in Nelly, laughing as she tells Nelly how glad she is that Cathy died and that she has left Heathcliff. Rejected shelter by Edgar, Isabella eventually finds refuge in the South of England and gives birth to a son, Linton. Hindley dies six months after Catherine, and Heathcliff thus finds himself master of Wuthering Heights.
=== Heathcliff's maturity (Chapters 18 to 31) ===
Twelve years pass. Catherine's daughter Cathy has become a beautiful, high-spirited girl. Edgar learns that his sister Isabella is dying, so he leaves to retrieve her son Linton in order to adopt and educate him. Cathy, who has rarely left home, takes advantage of her father's absence to venture further afield. She rides over the moors to Wuthering Heights and discovers that she has not one but two cousins: Hareton, in addition to Linton. She also lets it be known that her father has gone to fetch Linton. When Edgar returns with Linton, a weak and sickly boy, Heathcliff insists that he live at Wuthering Heights.
Three years pass. Walking on the moors, Nelly and Cathy encounter Heathcliff, who takes them to Wuthering Heights to see Linton and Hareton. Heathcliff hopes that Linton and Cathy will marry, so that Linton will become the heir to Thrushcross Grange. Linton and Cathy begin a secret friendship, echoing the childhood friendship between their respective parents, Heathcliff and Catherine.
The following year, Edgar becomes very ill and takes a turn for the worse while Nelly and Cathy are out on the moors, where Heathcliff and Linton trick them into entering Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff keeps them captive to enable the marriage of Cathy and Linton to take place. After five days, Nelly is released and later, with Linton's help, Cathy escapes. She returns to the Grange to see her father shortly before he dies.
Now master of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, Cathy's father-in-law, Heathcliff, insists on her returning to live at Wuthering Heights. Soon after she arrives Linton dies. Hareton tries to be kind to Cathy, but she withdraws from the world.
At this point, Nelly's tale catches up to the present day (1801). Time passes and, after being ill for a period, Lockwood grows tired of the moors and informs Heathcliff that he will be leaving Thrushcross Grange.
=== Ending (Chapters 32 to 34) ===
Eight months later, Lockwood returns to the area by chance. Given that his tenancy at Thrushcross Grange is still valid, he decides to stay there again. He finds Nelly living at Wuthering Heights and enquires what has happened since he left. She explains that she moved to Wuthering Heights to replace the housekeeper, Zillah, who had left.
Hareton has an accident and is confined to the farmhouse. During his convalescence, he and Cathy overcome their mutual antipathy and become close. While their friendship develops, Heathcliff begins to act strangely and has visions of Catherine. He stops eating and, after four days, is found dead in Catherine's old room. He is buried next to Catherine.
Lockwood learns that Hareton and Cathy plan to marry on New Year's Day. As he gets ready to leave, he passes the graves of Catherine, Edgar, and Heathcliff and pauses to contemplate the quiet of the moors.

Review: Minor Rivette, but still beautiful and involving. I haven't read Wuthering Heights for many years, and I barely remember the couple of previous adaptations (the William Wyler production from '39 and the Buñuel from '54) that I've seen, so I was much more interested in seeing this as a little-seen, supposedly minor work of Jacques Rivette than as yet another adaptation of a hoary English classic. That may well be the best way to look at it, as I found this a fairly involving, even compelling story of unrequited and difficult loves, not just between the central characters of Heathcliff (Roch in this version, an at first bloodless but later quite savage Lucas Belvaux) and Catherine (deceptively strong-willed in Fabienne Babe's performance)....throughout the film there are hints of incestuous feelings on the part of Catherine's older brother Guillaume, and all of the characters seem to have powerful love-hate attractions to their landscape and environment, here translated to a remote and rocky pair of farms in 1930s France. The class distinctions between orphan Roch, his on-the-decline adoptive family, and the on-the-rise siblings Olivier and Isabel are subtly drawn and the feelings of entrapment in the remote vastnesses of both the two huge country houses and the wild hillside are always present, if more potently presented in the early parts of the film. Beautifully shot, though the VHS copy I watched suffered from rather washed-out color; the very minimal and rarely heard music is from the Bulgarian Women's Choir, fitting ultimately if not a very obvious choice.When all is said and done Rivette's theatrical style of shooting and direction of performances offers a lot of interesting counterpoint to the madness at the heart of the story, the actors seeming cool and detached and often still at many points both before and after short eruptions of violence and passion, but ultimately it does drain some of the drama from the story and I found the second act after Roch's return less involving than the first. Still, this is far from awful as I had been led to believe it might be and though it is certainly one of the director's weaker films it remains well worth seeing to his fans.Letterboxed VHS tape, rental. 8/10. The most interesting adaptation of Brontë I have seen. The most interesting adaptation of Wuthering Heights I have seen. Rivette effectively blurs the boundary of psychological perception between what is real and what is imagined. This blurring is the point that is lost on the many people who question how this film can be part of Rivette's otherwise strikingly different oeuvre. This film is NOT the conventional adaptation of the novel it may seem to be at first glance. Throughout the film we sense the "fate" of the characters who have been preordained by Brontë's text to their gloomy fates - and ... yet - throughout the film we have glimpses of ways they could have escaped: the beauty of nature all around them, carefully observed in the cinematography, is one of these hints that "fate" could be simply a construct and that a different way of relating to what is "given" could open at any moment if the right conditions are met. Other potential 'escapes' from their literary fates are suggested in dream sequences as well as in the glances characters give each other and their environment. In the sense of providing the anticipation and hint of that OPENING away from fate, the film is like "Celine and Julie Go Boating," but in its own subtler way. A masterpiece.. Curious step backwards. If you've seen other films by Jacques Rivette, you might wonder, just as I do, what this Victorian novel adaptation was all about. If you've seen other films by this unique director - especially "Celine and Julie go boating" or newer ones like "Secret Defense" and "Histoire de Marie et Julien" - this mid-eighties try just doesn't fit.Take the 1974 masterpiece "Celine and Julie" for comparison. In it, two very open-minded young women (both practitioners of different kinds of "magic") get tangled in a mysterious old-fashioned love triangle story, taking place in a archetypal haunted (Victorian) house. When they figure out that the 10-year old daughter of the house-owner is going to get murdered out of love madness, they decide to sneak into the house and rescue her.The thing is, you know from the beginning that the pathetic melodrama in the haunted house is not real in the sense that Celine and Julie are. It's rather they invented the whole story just to kill time & have some fun with out-dated storytelling. It's essentially a illustration of what is called "deconstruction". The melodrama just serves as something that can be manipulated or even laughed at. Rivette (respectively, Celine and Julie) play very freely with a kind of narrative that doesn't seem to work anymore.Unfortunately, "Hurlevent" has just the feeling of the haunted house sequences of the earlier movie - and that means, the characters are not likable, seem like marionettes, bloodless, dull. It completely lacks the light-hearted (though very intellectual) sophistication that made "Celine and Julie" so enjoyable. Maybe Rivette wanted it just like that. Even if this is so, it doesn't make sense for me.