Produced by Gilles Sandoz

Cast: Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Coulloc’h, Hippolyte Girardot, Hélène Alexandridis, Hélène Fillières.

This multi-awarded adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, John Thomas and Lady Jane, has a particularly vibrant quality. It’s a celebration of the regenerating power of love and sexual intimacy, of life at its most urgent and primal and its most exalted in deep human connection. It’s poignant too in the fact that the book was written while Lawrence was dying of tuberculosis. When privately published in 1928, the book became infamous. It was to be the crux of obscenity trials in the UK, Australia, India and the US from the 60s onwards. Apparently, moral standards of the same suffocating rigidity against which Lawrence wrote so poetically and dangerously were in need of defending, protecting the public from rabid licentiousness. Scandalised moralists were too shocked by the use of four-letter words to see a vision of life taken directly from nature rather than society’s mores. This compelling groundedness in nature, echoing the book, informs the film most gloriously, while also examining social status, political issues and gender identifications in a peripheral way.

French director Pascale Ferran has created a film that is highly erotic. Through the story of Constance, Lady Chatterley (Marina Hands) suffocating in an arid marriage, who falls in love and has an affair with her husband’s game keeper, there’s a recognition of what Lawrence was really saying. Constance’s husband Clifford (Hippolyte Girardot) is wheelchair-bound after being wounded in the Great War and has retreated into a mental fortress, both emotionally disconnected from his wife and suspicious of her. In these days of readily accessible pornography, the difference between gratuitous salaciousness and eroticism is clear. It’s in the lingering shots of seasonal changes in the woods and meadows; in the piping of birds in trees that overshadow the trickling clear water of a spring; in the tremble of new blossoms in wind. It’s also in the hesitant, slow uncovering of a thigh, the gentle moving aside of layers of clothing, the quickening in the blood and breathing of the two actors, whose total commitment to intimacy is impressive, their nakedness profoundly deeper than skin. Nature is not used as a mere metaphor in this film but an agent of transformation in hearts, minds and bodies open to its powerful influence. As they open to each other, their growing freedom surpasses their socially sanctioned limitations.

The film proceeds rather too slowly through scenes of Constance depleted of energy, unengaged, and politely attending to her husband’s care until a Mrs Bolton (Hélène Alexandridis) comes to help. Free to wander in the woods to pick wildflowers, Constance comes upon the pheasant and chicken hatchery tended by Parkin the game keeper (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h). It’s in her gradually developing relationship with Parkin that the slow pace comes into its own, and the erotic overtures between them are seen in the context of a kind of foreplay by the director. Nevertheless, perhaps 30 minutes could have been cut from early in the film and later when Constance and her sister Hilda (Hélène Fillières) travel overseas, without damaging the potent life-affirming impact, or the nuances of complex characters and their evolution. Illuminating performances by Hands and Coulloc’h enrich the deeply resonating beauty and timeless message of this film.

© Avril Carruthers   31^st August 2007