“We’re well aware that there’s another event today,” Malle said, nodding to the Super Bowl, as the audience laughed. “But here, we are pushing paperbacks, not quarterbacks.” Introducing the film, she said, “I’m so excited for you all to see this movie. I saw it this week and I was in technicolor heaven, and I know you will be, too.”
Viewers were soon lulled into a trance as the haunting and obsession-tinged love story between Margot Robbie’s Catherine and Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff unfolded amidst the epic, foggy beauty of rural England. (Without spoiling anything: Let’s just say that this is the kind of film that makes you put down your popcorn and gasp—either out of lust or shock. It opens in theaters, appropriately, on Friday, February 13.)
“On my way to the Chelsea Hotel, I did think of the description in the book about ‘frosty air that cut about her shoulders as keen as a knife,’ so in a way, having this on the coldest day of the year felt appropriate, especially because everyone got so hot and bothered during the screening,” Malle told Vogue afterwards.
Post-screening, director Emerald Fennell joined Malle for a conversation which will appear on an upcoming episode of The Run-Through With Vogue. During the chat, Fennell reveled in the chance to talk about the source material: “This is a book club, so I can really talk about it: I love this book so much.”
“I think it’s partly the magic box that is this novel, that everyone who reads it experiences something slightly different,” Fennell said. “It just completely obliterated me,” Fennell said, describing how she felt when she first read the book as a teenager. That first read ultimately inspired what Fennell is hoping to revive for filmgoers: “The thing that I really wanted to do with this film was to try and recreate the feeling of a teenage girl reading this book for the first time,” she said.
The wide-ranging conversation also touched on casting and creative decisions (the backstory to the “skin room,” for example), rain machines on the moors, the Saltburn bathtub scene equivalent, and the particulars of certain goopy, food-related foley.
After the final mist cleared and the credits rolled, guests debriefed in the lobby. It was “fabulously wet,” designer Jackson Wiederhoeft told Vogue, sharing their two-word review of the film.
Sufficiently heated up, everyone readied to brave the cold once more, this time with a Female Filmmakers Collection paperback edition of Wuthering Heights (with a foreword by Fennell) and a tasseled Vogue Book Club bookmark in hand. As for what was in their hearts and minds? That’s another story.