Wuthering Heights has the world on tenterhooks. Emerald Fennell’s reimagining of Emily Brontë’s windswept classic is set to push the boundaries of the period drama, weaving together gloriously over-the-top set design with whimsical costuming, playful world building, a winking humor, and no-holds-barred melodrama like we’ve never seen before.
What films inspired this big, bold swing? Well, according to leading lady Margot Robbie, they include the likes of The Notebook, The English Patient, and Titanic—unapologetically epic romances that sweep you off your feet. But, there are many, many more.
To that end, Fennell has now curated a very special program for the BFI: Love Stories, a set of supremely stylish films that influenced the Oscar winner’s soon-to-be cult classic, four of which will be screened at London’s BFI IMAX in February, in honor of Wuthering Heights’s release on February 13. (The BFI will also host Emerald Fennell in Conversation at BFI Southbank on February 4, where the director will discuss her filmmaking process.)
“Since its publication 200 years ago, critics have challenged Wuthering Heights’s validity as a love story,” Fennell said in a statement shared by the BFI. “It is too shocking, too cruel, too narratively strange to slip neatly into the world of romance, but it is a love story nonetheless. While researching it, I rewatched many of my own favorite ‘love stories,’ ones that challenged, subverted, even obliterated the conventions of the genre. These are stories which put the love story under duress, which stick a needle into the strawberry trifle, which show love in all its freakish, gory detail.”
Browse her full list of love stories below, and make sure to work your way through them before you catch Wuthering Heights.
Random Harvest (1942)
In wide-brimmed hats, sharp-shouldered power suits, and ruffled blouses, the luminous Greer Garson is the singer who enchants Ronald Colman’s tormented war veteran in Mervyn LeRoy’s swooning adaptation of the epic James Hilton novel of the same name—a delightfully preposterous tale of amnesia, double lives, and long-awaited reconciliation. A forgotten classic.
