Among the film adaptations of Emily Brontë’s novel, «Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights», directed by Peter Kosminsky in 1992, remains memorable. Starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche. Brilliant supporting actor Ryuichi Sakamoto, author of the soundtrack. The strength of that music was perceived from the first listening. The composer essentially moved between two poles: the obsessive and the spectral. Naturally the two things were in perpetual dialogue. They merged. They set off together. They explained to each other. The film chose the well-chosen setting of opening and closing on the figure of the writer who had brought the story to life. As a result, the viewer was able to accompany Emily Brontë who, wandering the moor, came across an abandoned house. Emily knew what was coming. Those stones would talk to her. They would have given her the ardent secret of a formidable plot that presented itself as if evoked by the earth, the sky, the rough rocks, the heather.
Sakamoto retained the basic idea of an evocation that was far more spiritual than phantasmal. A vague sense of light gothic that was released around the windows, on the tables of dark and thick wood, in the flickering dance of the flame of the fireplace in the dark room. The storms, the fog, the accumulation of clouds. And the sudden glimpses of the sun that heralded renewed darkening of the horizon. Sakamoto always returned to an ideal principle. At that first moment. To the poor and mistreated boy. In Heathcliff, who immediately was everything, the alpha and the omega, the past and the present that intersect, which suddenly cross and explode. Heathcliff looking around almost suspiciously, like a wounded animal hesitating to trust again. Always out of measure, all tenderness and all rancor, he found in Sakamoto’s compositions the ideal counterpart, the invisible interlocutor who took up the unfortunate thread of his story all over again, the inconsolable misfortune of his boundless love of he. The music passed through the film and through the house, between the wind and the bare branches of the trees. He left the doors open as he passed. He lingered in the hills. Weaving an almost more literary than sound tangle, as if it had been built with hidden words rather than with musical notes traced on the stave. Almost a metatext. A sort of encounter between different writings that had their fulcrum in the interpretation of Ralph Fiennes, a condensation of frost and fire, kindness and ferocity.
Sakamoto created a wonderful legacy of intensity. A musical gesture, his, which started subdued, almost a call. To then turn out to be disruptive. Wave motion that he took by the hand and carried away, lighting up with ruthless and luminous, dark and delicate sensibilities. Old curses that returned, went beyond the perimeter of individual lives and passed the generations, climbing over the years like weeds on the bars of a gate. Beyond that border, beyond the unspeakable of feeling went Emily Brontë. And there Sakamoto wasn’t afraid to follow her, with a simple, concentric theme that unfolded and looped back on itself as a distant call. Life and death in strange communion were a faint light of milk that blurred the threshold. And he reopened the dream. Why not, it wasn’t going to happen again. Not this time. No one would have humiliated the once poor child anymore, or turned their backs on the boy who worked in the stable. His soul would be made intact. Innocent, as it was in the beginning. Was Sakamoto perhaps thinking of this while, line after line, he plumbed the mystery of one of the most complex and challenging characters in literature of all time? We will never know. But one likes to believe it by listening once again to this shining track, a prodigy of human ingenuity.