ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER remains D.H. Lawrence’s most notorious novel. It has been filmed countless times but more often than not it’s literary merit has been the modest cloak for soft porn.

‘Lady Chatterley’ restores respect to the work by adapting an earlier version of the novel called ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’. It also benefits from the tender understanding of French director Pascale Ferran, who creates a lyrical tale of sexual awakening and female empowerment.

Filmed in French but true to the Lawrence story, the film unfolds in a beautiful vision of rural England in the 1920s. Constance (Marina Hands) is the wife of wealthy mine-owner Sir Clifford Chatterley (Hippolyte Girardot), a wheelchair-bound veteran of the First World War.

He is decent but dull. Her life is privileged but endlessly tedious. A doctor orders her to take more fresh air and modest exercise and so she starts to explore the estate. Walking among the sturdy oaks, wild creatures and scented flowers, she encounters virile gamekeeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h).

It is the beginning of a tentative attraction that slowly blossoms into a sensual, passionate affair that rescues her from the living death of her existence.

Intended as a series for French television, ‘Lady Chatterley’ runs for almost three hours, but the patient viewer is rewarded with a film that takes its time exploring the changes in Constance as she cast off her crippling inhibitions and grows from a naive, trembling youngster into a woman able to take control of her fate.

This is likely to stand as the definitive version of a frequently misunderstood classic.

Selected nationwide release
© Allan Hunter, 2007

Director: Pascale Ferran
Stars: Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Coulloc’h, Hippolyte Girardot, Helene Alexandridis, Helen Fillieres, Bernard Verley
Screenwriters: Pascale Ferran, Roger Bohbot, based on John Thomas and Lady Jane by D.H. Lawrence
Certificate: 18
Running time: 168 mins
Country: France
Year: 2006