There’s a scene in the new film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” directed by Emerald Fennell, in which Cathy, played by Margot Robbie, emphatically denies her feelings of jealousy for Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) after Isabella (Alison Oliver) expresses a romantic interest in him. How ridiculous, Cathy scoffs. She couldn’t care less.
But Cathy’s face tells a different story, as redness rises in her cheeks and catches light along her hairline.
It’s one of many moments in the film when complexion says what the characters do not. Like sweating or pupils dilating, blushing is an involuntary tell — an affliction of the nervous system that is mostly unwelcome, judging by the market of anti-redness, green-colored goops sold to hide it.
Within the corseted, cinched and girdled 19th-century society of Ms. Fennell’s vision for the film, however, blush becomes a vital means of expression for characters who cannot be taken at their word.
“Flush is this amazing physiological thing — it’s hormonal,” said Siân Miller, the makeup designer for the film. “To an extent, it can’t be controlled, and blush is a great tool to enhance that, to show emotions like embarrassment, anger and, of course, the state of arousal.”
Take Cathy: There is scarcely a minute in the film’s two-hour-plus run time when Ms. Robbie’s imperious protagonist is not noticeably red, whether from sexual pleasure, annoyance, grief, envy or shame. For the look, Ms. Miller found inspiration in the pre-Raphaelites and in portraiture of the period.
Complexion becomes a way of charting emotional topographies across the film, Ms. Miller said. This idea finds its clearest expression in the character of Isabella, the doll-like ward of Cathy’s husband, the wealthy and upstanding Edgar. Isabella’s transformation from sheltered naïf can be measured by her changing hue.
Early on, Isabella (played by the “Saltburn” actress Alison Oliver) wears a prim pink on the apples of her cheeks, conveying a distinct air of youthfulness but also artifice. As she succumbs to Heathcliff’s sadomasochistic seductions, her color darkens — until she is on all fours barking like a dog for her new husband, a flush spreading like wildfire across her neck and chest, which are also slick with perspiration.
In Cathy’s case, complexion was used to signal her shuttling between two worlds. When Cathy moved into the gilded walls of Thrushcross Grange after marrying Edgar, Ms. Miller swapped Robbie’s low-sitting blush for an upward sweep of color placed high on the cheekbones, which she described as “superficial” and “contrived.”
For Cathy’s visits home to the steadily decaying Wuthering Heights, Ms. Miller dipped her brush back into those original, more natural shades, “showing that backwards and forwards was very important to us,” she said.
Blush was not worn only by the women. As Heathcliff, Mr. Elordi reddens in physical exertion as he hauls hay and guts pigs on the farm. Even when he returns years later to the Grange as a sophisticate with a gold earring, he never washes himself clean of that workingman’s flush. “He’s made some money and cleaned up his complexion but he’s still got that … ” Ms. Miller said, trailing off. “It’s very erotic to have that look.”
The faces of “Wuthering Heights” feel undone. They can be blotchy and imperfect; you can see the skin beneath.
To let those imperfections through, Ms. Miller pulled back on heavy makeup. “Sometimes it’s all about what we don’t do,” she said.
In fact, complexion plays such a large role in Ms. Fennell’s adaptation that the director devotes an entire room to it.
The bedchamber that Cathy moves into at the Grange, an estate rendered in surrealist splendor by the production designer, Suzie Davies, is upholstered wall-to-wall in fleshy material resembling her skin, made from a photograph of Ms. Robbie’s inner forearm transposed onto fabric and then covered in stretched-out latex.
There is no effort to disguise anything. Rather, her blue-vein marbling and freckles are magnified here — alongside the single hair that sprouts from a mole.
As much as color signifies, so too does its absence. (Spoiler ahead!)
When Cathy dies, her skin takes on an exaggerated, almost cartoonishly gray pallor — an effect that Ms. Miller achieved using a palette called Sick and Terminal Illness, which she designed with the makeup company MaqPro.
“Emerald wanted her to look like wet concrete,” said Ms. Miller, who recalled a team of makeup artists waiting on set, ready to conceal any of Ms. Robbie’s skin peeking through the waxy exterior.
“Wuthering Heights” arrives at a moment when blush is enjoying an independent revival, no longer tied to the dusty compacts of 1980s glamour. Increasingly, modern makeup is about exposing what’s inside — a blazoning of feeling, its flagrant touch on your skin.
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