A Review of 'Lady Chatterley

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Lady Constance “Connie” Chatterley (Marina Hands) married Clifford Chatterley (Hippolyte Girardot) four years ago. Upon returning from battle on the Flanders battlefront in 1921 the couple moves to Wragby, the Chatterley family property most suitable for the war-wounded-into-a-wheelchair Clifford. Considerably older, rich, dull and impotent, Clifford’s manhood gives Connie lots of time to wander around the wonderful fields of Wragby.

One sunny day Connie comes upon a man standing postrorse to her. The wide, muscular back of the estate’s gamekeeper, Oliver Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h), ignites such a fierce primal urge of arousal and paralyzes in the lady that she becomes bedridden for days -- and not in a good way either.

During her recovery, Constance begins to prowl around to Oliver’s shack where the two slowly seduce one another.

Tender and titillating, the couple makes love, and will continue to make love until nearly the end of the 168-minute film, with their clothes on. This lack of nudity only heightens the film’s eroticism. The way the couple explore their bodies, slowly but not always surely, during the film’s six physical love scenes is some of the most erotic imagery ever illustrated at 24 frames per second.

Directed and co-written by Pascale Ferrain, Lady Chatterley is based on Lawrence’s John Thomas and Lady Jane, the second version of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Less loquacious than the chatting third version of Lady Chatterley’ Lover most readers identify with as the definitive version of the story, John Thomas and Lady Jane and Ferrain, Roger Bohbot and Pierre Trividic’s screenplay adaptation maintain the central characters of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover while Ferrain has moved the story from Britain to France and changed the lover from an ex-officer in the British Indian Army to a grounds gamekeeper.

Ferran has stated her reasons for adapting the book along aesthetic reasons and the film is a great success in using Lawrence’s material as a pretext to visualize and contextualize it into something new.

Meticulously Ferran and cinematographer Julien Hirsch shoot the interiors of the house at a level suggesting the presence of castration (male potency). The tops of heads and anything else suggesting the phallic are hacked off at the very top. When Constance first looks at her naked self into the mirror we are deprived of her vision. We get a profile. For Ferran, a woman’s gaze of her own body shall be privileged.

In contrast to the sterile home and the filthy mines, vegetation and livestock fill the atmosphere of Oliver’s love shack. There is an intimate sensual sense of continuity in the shack’s absence of abstinence and omnipresent presence of people lacking in the patriarchal binary frustrations of the main house and in the mines. And so on.

Yet clearly the most radical accomplishment of Lady Chatterley is the existence of love, intimacy and eroticism without the existence of nudity.

In the latter days of capitalism, sex is equated with the body. Billboards, magazines and movies equate pleasure with the display and acquisition of the body. Not the internal aspects of the body – where you really feel pleasure – but the façade of its form, in particular female. Our eyes tell us the pleasure is there and we logocentric occidentals believe it – despite and due to how many mythical movies we watch.

However, one must question the utility of this Lady Chatterly beyond its erotic involvement. There may be reasons to make a film like Lady Chatterley’s Lover in contemporary England, or, more importantly, in America, and set it in the present, but where are the political reasons for a French filmmaker setting a film in the France’s past? When it comes to sexual freedom France is surely one of the most liberated places on earth. Why show a French woman transgressing the sexual and class conventions of France in the 1920s? As far as I can tell, there is no popular nostalgic sentiment in France for it to return to some supposed puritanical past. Nor is it like Ferran needs to rework a chauvinistic novel into a feminist text a lá Jane Campion’s radical interpretation of Henry James A Portrait of a Lady (1881) in her 1996 film since Lawrence was a feminist.