Drawing on the most scandalous summer romance in English literature, French director Pascale Ferran has beautifully adapted "Lady Jane & John Thomas", the second version of D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover". Lawrence wrote the novel three times in two years, while suffering from the tuberculosis that killed him in 1930. All three versions concern the intense affair between a frustrated young aristocrat and her virile gamekeeper.
It tells a disarmingly simple story. Opening in 1921, Constance Chatterley (Marina Hands) is a young wife not so much oppressed by convention as bored with her marriage and detached from her own feelings. Her husband, Clifford (Hippollyte Girardot), wheelchair-bound from a war wound, has moved them to his family's estate, Wragby, where there is not much for Constance to do. Until, that is, she meets Oliver Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc'h), Wragby's gamekeeper, with his muscular physique and sad boxer's face. Lady Chatterley tells the story of their impossible love, an experience that transforms both their lives.
Winning 5 French Cesar awards in 2007 and with a gracious break-through performance by Marina Hands ("The Barbarian Invasions") "Lady Chatterley" is a coolly elegant, intoxicating, moving and romantic film, which also captures Lawrence's vision of a society in transition.
Director Pascale Ferran shows, with exemplary clarity and subtlety, the way sexual attraction, and the connection it creates, alters both Constance's and Parkin's perceptions of themselves, each other and the world around them. It's a film of sun-dappled beauty and unbridled joys that arrive as much as a surprise to the audience as they do to the characters. We are reminded of the resplendence of nature surrounding the couple, that when their love reaches full bloom, they seem thrillingly at one with the order of life.
In stripping "Lady Chatterley" of some of its mystique, Ms. Ferran has rediscovered both the novel's originality and the source of its durable appeal, which is not salaciousness but candor. She has made a love story that stands on its own, a film whose imaginative freedom perfectly matches the liberation experienced by its heroine. Joyfully passionate and delicately erotic, "Lady Chatterley" is sure to enthral audiences just as the book has for almost 80 years.
