The scene comes early.

Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) grabs the diminutive Cathy (Margot Robbie) by the corset, and bicep-curls her to his 6’5” eye-level.

Thus ocularly engaged, he demands that she kiss him.

My cinema audience collectively gasps, and I begin more accurately to understand what I am witnessing.

***

Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is the cause of internet opprobrium and box office joy.

The former hasn’t noticed the film’s “quotation marks”, and the latter doesn’t care.

This 136-minute master-blast from the dazzling Ms Fennell comes hot on the heels of the 126-minute movie-sonnet, Hamnet. The films are of a piece, exploring the nature of love and loss in ye olde England. They also hint at a certain robustness of the English psyche, able to withstand its most beloved Gothic novel brought to life by two Aussie lead-actors, and its Bard and bard-Bride played by actors Irish.   

As if by way of compensation, Fennell, in interview, is the essence of Oxbridge Englishness. But let not her plummy accent and intellectual feminism lead you astray: this movie is made by the woman who invented Anglo-kitsch maximalism, with a whiff of porn-chic tearing up the rear.

***

It is twenty years since I read Emily Brontë’s novel. With Angelou-precision, I remember little of what happened and all of how Brontë made me feel.

Wuthering Heights was a glorious read.

It had passion, earthiness, desire and despair – all filling the heart-shaped space that ladies’ novels of the day were expected to occupy. I recall prose so beautiful that I surely invited a subordinate clause out to dinner.

And, most of all, I remember the novel’s last paragraph, which describes peace among the harebells. Perhaps this was the best-earned dénouement in all of English literature?

***

And so here I am, for the first time since Barbie, sharing a cinema with a heap of teenage girls amid ambient sounds of Maltesers, popcorn and mobile notifications.

Early on, Cathy makes a snide remark to Nelly regarding her companion’s ability to love, and it makes me chuckle. It is a throwaway comment, establishing the characters’ places in the social hierarchy.

“Bitch!” a girl in the back row yells.

The cinema erupts in giggles, and I am transported to the joy of secondary school high-jinx.

On seeing the swathes of uniform skirts on entering the cinema, I had assumed Wuthering Heights was on the school curriculum. But it’s not that complex. These girls are hot – very hot – for their bodice-grabber-in-chief.

Heathcliff is a rogue; and Elordi is a ride.

***

“Her ignorance is outrageous” declares an online critique regarding the movie’s director, with a list of literal and censorious complaints: characters have been written out, the costumes aren’t of the period, Isabella should not enjoy humiliation, there’s too much erotic gloop, Margot Robbie is too old…   

Further, the level of pablum regarding Fennell’s casting is widespread and demoralising.

Such punters have decided that Heathcliff is written as mixed race and hence should be played by someone of mixed race. In casting Elordi, the director is accused of whitewashing.

But the moral outrage of the masses strikes a faux note, as its criticism is inconsistent.

Nelly and Edgar – each character fully rooted in Yorkshire – are wonderfully played by actors, of Thai and Pakistani/British ethnicity respectively. Such skin tones, so far from Brontë’s vision, must surely awaken vengeance.

Of course not.

In the main, the push-back is a one-way street. To avoid casting white people is to win in every circumstance; it would appear. Unfortunately, the politics of identity are now pitched as the urgent responsibility of art, from which right and wrong choices emerge.

Such is the current nadir of film criticism, through which we are each debased.

***

Emerald Fennell is a genius of her time, and the Lady Gaga of cinema direction. She tells stories Emerald’s way – as is the wont of the artist.

I thoroughly enjoyed her flashy, topsy, tipsy film, which debuted on Valentine’s Day, lest her zone of interest were in doubt.

Much of the novel is stripped out – characters, tensions, plot lines – so that only the obsession remains. This is a choice, and one that brings simplicity and focus to the film.

The spare beauty of the moors is off-set by the majesty of Cathy’s rich-girl robes. The effect is sensorial, metaphorical and full of revealing detail.

Margo Robbie – an actress and movie executive I admire – is arrestingly beautiful in this silver story, obsessed with closeups.

As for Mr Elordi – who is in fact of half-Basque, half-Brit ethnicity – my teenager compadres make it clear when he delivers sufficient steaminess.

Such moments include his pawing of crushed eggs, eating Cathy’s unwashed fingers, and his triumphant return to the moors as a gold-toothed man of mystery. Handsome Heathcliff is a man of little words. But even they conspire to a little more steam.

“I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”

***

Art is personal; personally made and personally consumed. There is no correct way to deliver artistry, and nor is there a correct way to critique its effects.

In this sense, I must bow my hat to the pedlars of outrage.

Fennell’s casting of Elordi upsets the progressives as much as their casting of her choices upsets me.

So far, we are even.