The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 22-28
Wuthering Heights (1988)
Directed by Yoshishige Yoshida
Emily Brönte’s lone novel, the Gothic Wuthering Heights (1847), has been a source of inspiration for many films made in different countries. In England and in Hollywood, the tale’s doomed central couple has been rendered as Cathy and Heathcliff; in France, as Catherine and Roc; in Mexico, as Catalina and Alejandro. Even better than the adaptations helmed by William Wyler, Jacques Rivette, and Luis Buñuel, though, is the feudal Japan-set rendering from Japanese New Wave master Yushida (known best today for the amazing Eros + Massacre), who recast Brönte’s couple as Kinu and Onimaru.
This haunted and haunting jidaigeki, like its English early 1800s-set source text, focuses on an orphaned young man (here played by a wild-haired and angry-eyed Yusaku Matsuda) who during a number of years comes to violently resent the wealthy family that took him in but forced a separation between him and the daughter of the house (a pale, pain-stricken, phantasmagoric Yuko Tanaka), his childhood love. The boy grows up into a monster distorted by his living in the past, a distortion staged impressionistically through clouds curling across hillsides, blood spurting from flesh wounds caused by Onimaru’s sword, and worms eating at dead-but-not-forgotten human flesh. The film revives a vanished world and, over time, shows it threatened with disappearance, until it is left—like a long-gone love affair—to live on in memory alone.
Yoshida’s film, along with three of the other four Wuthering Heights adaptations in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s themed series, will screen on a 35mm print. Aaron Cutler (February 25, 6pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Heathcliff, It’s Me: Adapting Wuthering Heights”)