Product Details

• Actors: Fabienne Babe, Lucas Belvaux, Sandra Montaigu, Alice de Poncheville, Olivier Cruveiller
• Directors: Jacques Rivette
• Format: Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: French
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Image Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: January 2, 2002
• Run Time: 126 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00005TNF9
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #202,567 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Wuthering Heights (1985)" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not worth exploring, February 5, 2002

By 

Robert Bezimienny (Sydney, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Wuthering Heights (1985) (DVD)

For many years I have struggled against the suspicion that Emmanuelle Beart (sans habillement) is the reason 'La Belle Noiseuse' remains one of my favourite films; there was, after all, the lingering possibility that Jacques Rivette was in fact a genius. With this in mind I recently purchased two of his films on DVD, this and 'Gang of Four' - I'm afraid the money would have been better spent on a poster of Emmanuelle.
*
Rivette has decided that 'Wuthering Heights' best be interpreted as the product of a childish imagination (not a very flattering assessment of Emily Bronte's powers). The actors here are very young and, unfortunately for mine, neither highly experienced nor talented, the male leads in particular being singularly hapless. The lighting is natural where possible and most of the film appears shot on location. The intention of all of this could be to render the story with a certain rawness, however this rawness is difficult to distinguish from amateurishness. Most damning is the incredible lack of emotion portrayed given the subject matter. It is as if the whole story is an invocation of an adolescent girl's dream, and as such filled with thin romantic whims rather than credible human reactions - this seems an underestimation of the original novel, of adolescent girls, and in any case makes for a very dull film.
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Other aspects of the film contribute to the disappointment. Transporting the drama from the moors to the pleasant French countryside does little to deepen the mood; the music is quirky and unexpected, but it also feels arbitrary, and works against any coherent artistic vision; and this is probably the only time that the sound effects in a film drew attention to themselves - they are appalling, the crickets in the opening scenes sounding more like malfunctioning electrical transformers than insects. The DVD transfer is poor, picture and sound quality being marginal, and there are no extra features whatsoever, not even a decent printed precis.
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Are there are any upsides to this? Well, Catherine is played by Fabienne Babe, a woeful actress but a beautiful woman - but I'm afraid that compensates little for what is a truly dreadful film.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Minor Rivette, but still beautiful and involving, September 23, 2009

By 

Muzzlehatch (the walls of Gormenghast) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Wuthering Heights (1985) (DVD)

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.

I watched the currently OP Kino VHS; you'd be better off getting hold of the British DVD, assuming you have a multiregion DVD player - and if you're even remotely a fan of this director, or European cinema in general, you certainly should have one.

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved it!, September 12, 2009

By 

G. Fowler "bookfilmlovergalore" (South Carolina) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wuthering Heights (1985) (DVD)

I collect film adaptations of Wuthering Heights and I thought this has enomorous artistic credit. While it changes the names of the characters and ups the setting to the Frencb countryside in the 1930's, the actual story is true to the 1st half of Emily Bronte's masterpiece. But it is true that the director seems more interested in putting his own "auteur" mark on the film than the actual story. But damn -- his auteur mark is good. On a side note: The lead actor also became a good director later.