Kritiken

In an era particularly skeptical of the ostentatious and melodramatic, and with Téchiné seemingly relegated, along with elder statesmen such as Benoît Jacquot and Bertrand Tavernier, to an unfortunate modern variation onla qualité français, this film feels, perhaps paradoxically considering its self-conscious construction, not only pure but uncommonly engaged with histories both literary and cinematic. And in that sense it feels just as assertive as Téchiné's more rebellious work.

The intelligent austerity that marks André Téchiné's underappreciated fourth film, The Brontë Sisters (1979), is a rarity both for the director, whose work, at least since the mid-1990s, has frequently succumbed to voluble hysterics, and the literary biopic... That this is a serious meditation on the creators of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, classic texts whose screen adaptations have too often devolved into clamorous Victorian bodice-rippers, makes its hush all the more admirable.

The lives of the Brontës were marked by ambition, transgression, and tragedy, but André Téchiné's 1979 The Brontë Sisters is all the more haunting for being stylized and elliptical. The script by Pascal Bonitzer draws on primary sources, and Téchiné elicits restrained but electric performances... While the astringent formalism echoes the family's austere circumstances, the characters' vivid interior lives emerge through language and gesture.

It is too easy to dismiss André Téchiné’s The Brontë Sisters as an extravagant arthouse failure. A failure it may be, but its art-film pedigree – seemingly vouched for its high literary markings, turgid pacing, painterly positioning of actors, excessive attention to costume and décor, and mandatory “beautiful photography” – is, I think, questionable.