On Thursday March 2, the Williams Lake Film Club is bringing Frances O’Connor’s newly released Emily to the big screen, with Emma Mackey starring in the title role.
Centred on the life of Emily Brontë, the film imagines Emily’s inspiration for the creation of her seminal (and only novel) Wuthering Heights.
Very little is actually known about the life of Emily Brontë, and O’Connor uses this freedom to imagine a dramatic, sensuous and fervent fictional life for her, one capable of envisioning how she came to write such a tremendous and ground breaking work, while still staying true to many of the known details of her life.
If you have an impression that literary biopics are boring, dull, or stiff, O’Connor has created a life for Emily that is anything but.
Instead, it’s playful, humorous, imaginative, and passionate, while still invoking the mysterious, Gothic, and haunted qualities that personified her written work, as well as the incredible landscapes that inspired her. There’s no need to have read Wuthering Heights beforehand either, but one thing to keep in mind is that the novel, published in 1847, was shocking to the literary world of the time – it was ambitious, with an innovative multi-layered narrative structure, and it contained potent themes of emotional cruelty and examinations of morality which were scandalous to the Victorian sensibilities of the time.
We’ll start off with some facts: the Brontë family lived in Haworth, a village in the City of Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. Emily’s father, Patrick Brontë, was the resident parish priest (or curate). When Emily was three, her mother Maria died of cancer, and a few years thereafter she lost her two eldest sisters to typhoid fever.
Emily grew up as the middle sister of two surviving sisters, her younger sister Anne, and older sister Charlotte, as well as their older brother, Branwell.
All the Brontë sisters wrote, and all published their work under male pseudonyms at the time. We do know that Emily was enigmatic. By nature, she was shy and reclusive, and would suffer unbearable melancholy when away from her home and family.
We also know that Emily died tragically in 1848, at the age of 30, from tuberculosis. Her death came one year after the publication of Wuthering Heights. While there is no denying her short life was steeped in tragedy, the film brings her character to life in a way that is vital and vibrant.
The narrative of the film begins at Emily’s deathbed, when sister Charlotte (played by Alexandra Dowling) implores Emily (played by Emma Mackey) to explain the basis of her fictional characters, and tell the secret of how she created Wuthering Heights. From Emily’s perspective, we are taken through a series of vivid remembrances or vignettes, starting in childhood, that blend into an origin story for the novel.
We learn the household of the Brontë’s was bustling with curiosity and imagination (we do know the girls had very active imaginations, and had access to a wide variety of literature).
Their quasi-feminist, though stern and devoutly religious father, emphasized education, and independence. Her relationship with her sisters is close, but not without conflict and rivalry. Her best friend and confidant is her older brother Branwell (played by Fionn Whitehead), a rebel, painter, dreamer, and addict. When William Weightman (played by Oliver Jackson Cohen), a new upstanding young curate arrives on the scene, all the girls swoon, except Emily. That changes later when her father signs her up to take French lessons under his tutelage. (That he and Emily were ever together romantically is probably pure fiction, but it’s enthralling and mischievous to entertain the idea).
As played by Emma Mackey, Emily is mesmerizing to watch: she is observant, witty, intense, passionate, brave, fierce, self-conscious, and given to mercurial mood swings. She is highly intelligent and imaginative, but socially inept. She is shy, but full of emotion. Her sisters love her, but they are also worried for her.
This is the writing and directorial debut for Frances O’Connor, though she has a longstanding history as an actor, and has starred in many period pieces herself (she was the lead character in the screen adaptation of Mansfield Park in 1999), and also had roles in The Importance of Being Earnest, Madame Bovary, and Mr. Selfridge.
She knows her way around period dramas, and directs with assurance. She avoids situating the film in the prevailing revisionist trend in costume dramas right now, which is to impose present-day political attitudes onto historical figures of the past. Instead, O’Connor “tease[s] out a resonance between the Romanticism of the Brontë’s time and the more drastic individualism of our own” (Slant 2023).
This sensibility keeps the film feeling relevant. The cinematography by Nanu Segal is also excellent – by using natural light and hand-held camerawork, the film evokes intense and dramatic natural milieus of the surrounding countryside, the same surroundings that Emily immortalized in her book. Also of note are the wonderful costumes, by Oscar winning costume designer Michael O’Connor.
O’Connor and Mackey both hope the film will inspire a new generation of young woman, just as the book did, and still does.
As film critic Deborah Ross writes, “[Emily] is one of those films that is better than anyone can make it sound.” (Spectator 2022). It has been received very well critically, with a score of 91 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. In summary – don’t miss it!
Emily will be screening on Thursday, March 2 at the Paradise Cinemas (78 Third Ave South). Rated 14A – suitable for youth aged 14 and up. Tickets are $10. Advance tickets are now on sale at the Open Book, and remaining tickets will be sold in the cinema lobby prior to the screening. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and the show starts at 7:00 p.m..
We encourage you to get your tickets in advance, and to arrive early to get a good seat (and popcorn). To hear about the latest upcoming Williams Lake Film Club screenings, email: williamslakefilmclub@gmail.com.