How Wuthering Heights became this year’s most divisive film

In the trailer, Robbie is seen doing some highly suggestive breadmaking, her cheeks flushed and her bodice heaving, as she remembers Elordi’s naked torso. Then there are shots of a corset being pulled tight, of Elordi stripping off his shirt, and, errm, someone putting their finger in a fish’s mouth. A typical response to all this lust and lewdness was an article in The Spinoff entitled “Everyone hates the new Wuthering Heights trailer, and here’s why”. “Fennell is taking a piece of art and reducing it to its dullest form”, wrote Clare Mabey.

There were plenty of issues aside from the overt eroticism, too. The trailer was aggressively anachronistic, with Charli XCX on the soundtrack, and Cathy wearing a white wedding dress which, according to Vogue, “seemed as though it was more befitting of the 1980s than the early 1800s”. And when a clip from the film was released last month, the actors themselves were derided for being anachronistic. “They surely had great dentists back then,” said one comment on YouTube. “Love Margot, but she looks like she’s about to pull an iPhone out at any moment,” said another.

The reasons for the rancour

But these quibbles raise some big questions, the first one being: So what? Why shouldn’t Fennell come up with her own out-there, sexed-up version of Wuthering Heights? If Clueless can put a Jane Austen plot in 1990s California, and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet can do the same with Shakespeare, why should we be fussing about dress design?

There are two obvious answers, one of them suggested by the fact that, in the trailer, Robbie’s Cathy sounded posher than any screen character since, well, the toffs in Saltburn.

Fennell’s last film, Saltburn, was set in a stately home, and one of the best things about it was that the writer-director seemed to know her upper-class characters intimately. There is no mystery as to how she managed it: as the daughter of celebrated jewellery designer Theo Fennell, she grew up in gilded circles. To quote Patrick Sproull in Dazed, “Not a lot of 18-year-olds have their birthday party photographed by Tatler and attended by a Delevingne, multiple Guinness heirs, several members of the nobility and the daughter of Sting.” In short, Fennell is posh. Indeed, her background is so privileged that when she acted in The Crown as Camilla Parker-Bowles – now better known as Queen Camilla – she didn’t have to sound any grander than she does in ordinary life.