The Bronte Sisters (1979)

Popular reviews

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  Ah, those famous French authors the Brontë sisters.

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  How can a movie where Isabelle Huppert, Isabelle Adjani, and Marie-France Pisier play the Brontë sisters be so DULL? I love the desolate frozen heath location ripped straight from the pages of Wuthering Heights, and the actresses do the best with what limited material they're given. But why does this movie focus so much on the fuckup Brontë brother, Branwell? Who asked for a Branwell biopic? If Souers Brontë actually delivered on its title and focused more on how isolation, suffocating patriarchy, and repressed desire shaped the authors' lives and work it could've been a slam dunk! Also, dirt slathered Emily Brontë scraping through the moors in boy clothes and hiding scrap poems in her pockets. . . hello.

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  very beautiful but way too french and way too much branwell. the vibes are all wrong.

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  I remember liking Andre Techine’s The Bronte Sisters the one time I’d watched it, but this time, oh, my, do these girls have the miseries. Techine’s goal is apparently to explain the environment that led Charlotte (Marie-France Pisier), Emily (Isabelle Adjani), and Anne (Isabelle Huppert) to become writers, but all we see is doom and gloom. We don’t even know what they’re up to until we see them passing around a manuscript over halfway through the film. All we see are depictions of the various ways they are unhappy with their lives on the Yorkshire moors and with each other. The film captures the dull monotony of everyday life. The problem with that is that it’s dull and monotonous.

  Techine…

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  new season of feud anthology series but it’s the beef between isabelle huppert and isabelle adjani entitled ‘FRENCH BITCHFIGHT’ walk with me…

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  Isabelle Adjani, of course, steals the show as Kate Bush, running about the moors, going mad, and wasting away. Isabelle Huppert comes in a very distant second as a reserved Christine McVie, and Marie France-Pisier absolutely fades into the background as Crystal Gayle.

  Let's be kind and call this "episodic": a biopic of the three Brontë Sisters where their loser brother Bramwell is allowed to pull focus. Is that meant to mimic the workings of patriarchy? The ladies write a bunch of immortal masterpieces but the movie of their lives dotes on their unaccomplished brother?

  BONUS: Motherfucking Roland Barthes plays William Makepeace Thackeray!

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  why is it called the Bronte Sisters and 70% is about their boring brother? Isabelle Adjani in men's clothes roaming the moores and damning love, give me a whole movie of that.

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  The isabelle’s playing the brontës with amazing cinematography.. cinema i fear

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  isabelle adjani as emily bronte is the content i need to validate my existence

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  38/100

  Strike one: biopic. Strike two: biopic about writers. Strike three: Biopic about writers who led utterly uneventful lives, apart from their writing. (Plus all the Brontës died young, so at a certain point you're just waiting for the entire cast to keel over.) Without robust subject matter, Téchiné tends toward tasteful tedium, and here he only comes alive when depicting Branwell's ill-fated affair with (yes, this is historically true, albeit not known with 100% certainty) Mrs. Robinson. Emily wanders the heath ("ah, so that's where" kill me), Charlotte mostly frets, and Anne is about as vivid in this film as she is in literary history. Hopefully Apocalypse Now screened immediately after it at Cannes '79 and napalmed its feeble memory.

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  fantastique!
  I've been waiting to watch this version of the brontes for simply ages. Think I've seen the rest - the hollywood one; the 70s yorkshire tv series, the recent disappointment that was To Walk Invisible and now this...
  Of course I'm a bronte fan but as time has gone by I've found that even tho I like the literary adaptations, my real love is for the actual story of these sisters - because basically it's got it all. Isolated windswept location; imaginary lands; genius; unrequited love; secrets; hardships; triumphs; death; grief; three women walking round a table reading to one another; female friendships; tragedy; a wastrel brother who garners all the attention; beautiful poetry just waiting to be discovered;…

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  the frenchification of the brontë sisters