Dir. Pascale Ferran, France/Belgium/UK, 2006, 168 mins, French with subtitles
Cast: Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Coulloc'h, Hippolyte Girardot
Review by Carol Allen
The novel we know as "Lady Chatterley's Lover", which was the subject of the famous 1960 obscenity trial and therefore parent of the literary freedom we enjoy today, is not the only version of D.H. Lawrence's story. He wrote three - "The First Lady Chatterley", which he then immediately followed with a longer and sexually more explicit version with the somewhat risible title for English speaking readers of "John Thomas and Lady Jane". The version we know in the UK, on which previous film versions have been based, with its sexist harping on about the glories of Mellors' and by implication Lawrence's male equipment, is the third and was written when he was dying and possibly impotent. Some literary critics are now of the opinion that the best of the bunch is that second version, which is the one known in France as "Lady Chatterley et l'homme du bois" and the one on which Pascale Ferran has based this film.
The basic story is, however, pretty much the one we're used to. Clifford Chatterley (Girardot) has returned from the First World War paralysed from the waist down, leaving his young bride Constance facing a life without sexual love. She finds herself increasingly drawn to her husband's gamekeeper Parkin (not Mellors in this version), an attraction which eventually explodes into a passionate affair.
Hands (the daughter of director Terry Hands and French actress Ludmila Mikael) and Couylloc'h are both very good in the leading roles. They look and behave like real people, not actors. Despite her husband's wealth, Constance is actually somewhat provincially dowdy rather than being the glamorous fine lady, in contrast to the Parisian chic of her bossy fashion plate sister Hilda (Helene Fillieres). Couylloc'h at times displays something of the powerful physicality and sexuality of the young Marlon Brando. The relationship between them develops slowly and convincingly and one of the visual strengths of the film is its awareness of the power of nature and the changing seasons, which echo the love story. The sex scenes, when we come to them, although explicit enough, are very discreetly handled without losing what they're actually about. They concentrate on the faces of the characters and the emotions they are feeling rather than just what they're doing with their bodies. Once the affair begins, however, the scenes follow on so swiftly one after another that they get a touch tedious, while sequences of the couple running naked in the rain with their boots on and a scene where Parkin threads flowers into Constance's pubic hair tread a very tricky line between the romantic and the ridiculous.
Despite the sympathy evoked by his disability, Clifford comes over as somewhat unpleasantly arrogant – he and his nurse Mrs Bolton (Helene Alexandridis) are the only ones incidentally, who convince as being English - but one really feels for his frustration and helplessness in the sequence where his motorized wheelchair packs up and leaves him stranded and dependent on Parkin; one of several places where one feels the director's political viewpoint with regard to universal equality and the injustice of the class system.
Stylistically the film suffers from a slight clumsiness in its use of captions and later a female voiceover narration. This may have something to do that with the fact that there is an even longer two part version made for television, though as this one covers the ground more than thoroughly, one wonders what else could be in the other. And despite references to nearby Sheffield , it is difficult to believe there is a northern English coal mining community nearby. The whole look of the film is very French. The Chatterleys live in what is undoubtedly a château, not a stately home, with window locks that are traditionally French and despite the serving of tea, the Chatterley's lifestyle seems more that of a wealthy French couple rather than the English aristocracy. However the French would probably make a similar comment about an English adaptation of say "Madame Bovary", while the audience in the film's native land obviously weren't bothered, as it has won tons of prizes there, including five Césars, the French equivalant of Oscars.
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