The words “Lady Chatterley” conjure up a long-ago scandal involving censorship and sex. To a later generation, undoubtedly, they conjure up soft-core movies on cable TV.
With or without clothing-challenged Sylvia Kristel, movie adaptations of the once-notorious D.H. Lawrence novel have been frequent. A new French film, the winner of five Cesar awards (that’s France’s version of the Oscars), sets a new standard for the material. This is a revelatory version, somehow both blunt and tender, that wipes away any hint of Euro-trash porn.
Director Pascale Ferran based her adaptation on the second of three versions of the novel written by Lawrence (most movie versions have used the third). The film is nearly three hours long and unfolds in slow, non-salacious, thoughtful scenes.
This very British story is here rendered in French – which takes some getting used to. But if Hollywood can make movies with Roman gladiators speaking English, why not?
The basic outline of the story is the same: After World War I, Lady Constance Chatterley finds herself isolated in her husband’s country estate. He has been paralyzed during the war, and their physical (and emotional) relationship is over.
And so she takes up with the gamekeeper, Oliver Parkin, a quiet and uneducated man who lives in the natural world. Lawrence emphasized the sexual component of the awakening between Lady and gamekeeper, and Ferran isn’t about to back off from that. The sexual encounters between the two grow more intimate as the film goes on.
The first interesting thing about this movie is that the actors who play Lady Chatterley and Parkin, Marina Hands and Jean-Louis Coulloc’h, are not conventional casting. Hands looks slightly plain and clumsy at first, and Coulloc’h more closely resembles the burly Irish actor Brendan Gleeson than a hunky male model.
And yet as the film rolls on, they seem absolutely right. Ferran’s movie is not a handsome period piece with overstuffed pillows – the TV-movie treatment of a literary classic. Rather, it looks as though it had been caught on the run, casually photographed in real locations as it was actually happening.
It’s exquisitely made, though. The soundtrack alone, sometimes filled with birdsong or the sound of falling snow, is a beauty.
Lots of the movie plays without dialogue, as though Ferran had noticed, unlike many moviemakers, that quite a bit of life goes by without anybody saying anything.
“Lady Chatterley” is a genuinely unusual picture. It feels like something made with absolute honesty – and honesty is perhaps what Lawrence’s story is really about, rather than sex.
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