This morning kicked off with The Moth Diaries (pictured), the latest film by Mary Harron, whose work I have always liked and looked forward to. On paper, it looked to be a kind of light tween horror, and I had some trepidation about that. The reality is thankfully more sophisticated, but I wasn't quite sure whether the film met its own goals, which were, admittedly, quite lofty. Unlike the Twilight series, this is a film in which the vampire is a metaphor for the horrors that teenage girls experience, and not some dangerous, sexualised 'other'. Quite literally, it drains the life out of its victims, not simply by drinking their blood but by preying on them mentally, starving and then isolating them.
It begins in an upbeat fashion with Rebecca (Sarah Bolger) returning to boarding school for her second year there. She's 16 or 17 and just beginning to rediscover her youth after a harrowing experience with death (her father, a famous poet, slashed his wrists when she was a child). Thanks to her closest friend Lucie (Sarah Gadon), Rebecca is starting to enjoy life again, and things couldn't be better – that is, until the arrival of a mysterious new girl named Ernessa (Lily Cole). Ernessa is pale and reserved but certainly intelligent, and within weeks she is buddying up to Rebecca's bestie. At the same time, however, Lucie starts to become ill and wasted, causing Rebecca to consider the unthinkable: that Ernessa is some kind of vampire, enslaving Lucie and sucking away her life force.
The body horror elements are what work best in this; I spoke to Harron afterwards, and she talked about the way the experiences of young teenage girls are usually parlayed into screwy comedies, when in actual fact those years can be anything but fun. Under the cover of genre, Harron's film covers such topics as bullying, girl crushes, anorexia, jealousy and peer pressure, not to mention the physical changes that come with adolescence. And for a while it promises to be highbrow addition to the vampire-movie canon too, throwing in references to Le Fanu's Carmilla and Bram Stoker's Dracula while striving for an authentically gothic atmosphere. Somehow, though, it just didn't gel: several people commented to me about the amount of exposition crammed into an 85-minute movie, the girls never seemed to be quite in mortal danger (always fatal to a horror movie), and Cole doesn't quite nail the double-headed coin of being nasty/nice that the film needs in order to work. Still, although it's my least favourite of Harron's films, it's nevertheless intelligent and at times quite subtle, with ideas you'd be hard-pressed to find in the awful Fright Night.
I'd pretty much say the same thing about Andrea Arnold's new film Wuthering Heights, which I was really, really looking forward to, having loved Wasp (her short-film debut), Red Road and Fish Tank. I left, however, feeling more than a bit crestfallen. I've never been tempted to read Emily Bronte's novel but I may do now, if only to see how such a spare, minimal and frustrating film can be made from such a well-thumbed classic. The film begins with a young black boy being adopted by a Yorkshire farmer and brought back to meet his new family, the Earnshaws, who don't welcome the addition at all. Renamed Heathcliff, the boy has a love-hate relationship with the Earnshaws' daughter, Catherine, and when he overhears her saying that she loves him but could never marry him, Heathcliff storms off into the rain, across the wily, windy moor (© Kate Bush). Years later, an older Heathcliff reappears, vowing to take back the woman he loves. But Cathy is now married, to a respectable neighbour, and the obsessive Heathcliff's intervention is doomed to cause chaos.
Now, although I'm not familiar with the book, I know where Arnold is coming from and I see her angle. But her Wuthering Heights is a slog where her other films have flown so easily. In scope, it tilts at There Will Be Blood in terms of its remorseless depiction of a cruel rural world, and the film's visual confidence almost gets it there (albeit in Academy ratio). But what should be tight and atmospheric is disjointed and rambling, especially in the second half. It's an ambitious third film for sure, but Arnold's forte is character, which is in short supply here. It is also quite monstrously long; for a film in which so little happens, Wuthering Heights drags on for a relentless 2hrs 8, padded out with the unnecessary tics you often see in films by first-timers (shots of beetles, rain, cobwebs, etc). Maybe I'll revisit it someday, but I'm in no hurry. Which is annoying, since this is, for me, the last big film of the festival: after tomorrow's screening of Abel Ferrara's 4.44 Last Day On Earth, I'll be leaving Venice for Toronto, which will hopefully be more polite, better organised, much, much cheaper, and won't have a big fucking hole in the centre of the festival area. All I can say is, bring it on!
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