In an era where sex has infiltrated almost every level of culture, through advertising, Internet porn, chat rooms, txt flirt, single bars, soap operas, gossip rags, religion, and even politics, it seems difficult to fathom how D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was at one time the source of great controversy. For director Pascale Ferran, the decision to adapt Lawrence’s text in this era of ‘permissibility’ is an interesting one, though far from an overwhelming triumph.
Unlike some other adaptations of Lawrence’s novel, Ferran’s film doesn’t attempt to modernise the text for a contemporary audience. Set in 1921, Lady Chatterley traces the sensual awakening of idle aristocrat Constance (Marina Hands), through her relationship with isolate gamekeeper, Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h). It’s difficult to recall the plot of Chatterley without evoking thoughts of parody – Seinfeld’s description of Rochelle, Rochelle is one that instantly springs to mind. Ferran however, treats the material with a precise earnestness. It’s as if the director intended the film as an evocation of sexuality untarnished and untouched by the ravages of post modernity. However, it’s in this nostalgic yearning for a bygone era that Lady Chatterley seems to come unstuck.
Rather than filter her adaptation through a contemporary perspective, and seemingly abandoning the critique of sexual repression that underscores Lawrence’s work, Ferran’s adaptation labours its desire for a sensuality that no longer exists. There’s a sexual naïveté in this film that’s almost childlike. Constance spends her days in the natural world, picking flowers and staring wide-eyed as she grasps a small bird for the first time. Her interest in Parkin is similarly adolescent, inspired by an inadvertent glance at his naked torso. And yet as her desire for him grows she remains entirely innocent, repeatedly fumbling and retreating from their brief romantic interludes. The naïveté that underscores Lady Chatterley is not just thematic but extends also to the film’s formal construction. The opening third of the film is characterised by a stylistic approach that evokes a real-time sensibility through static camera shots, long single takes, and a slow meditative pace.
The problem is however, that like Ferran’s attempted recreation of a forgotten sensuality the film’s formal approach mirrors a now distant cinematic past. The result feels somewhat laboured: more tiresome than introspective. The evocation of boredom here seems an attempt to draw the audience into Constance’s psychic state, but this approach is not entirely well considered. In collapsing the spectator’s relationship to the central character through a stylistic naïveté Ferran attempts to regress the audience with little consideration to contemporary cinematic techniques. Like the title cards that Ferran intersperses throughout the narrative, and which serve as momentary ellipses of time, the film’s presentation feels more literary than cinematic. Such a strategy may have worked if the film was attempting to draw associations between form and representation, between the depiction of sexuality in literature as opposed to that of cinema, but here such techniques seem almost incidental.
This potential for social critique is overlooked elsewhere in Lady Chatterley, particularly in regard to the class difference that seemed so prominent in Lawrence’s novel (Ferran adapted the second of Lawrence’s three versions of the story). Here, Constance’s fetishisation of Parkin’s working class body (and the younger miners from whom she steals glances) is subsumed through the film’s incessant focus on nature. Rather than emphasise the violation of social practices symbolised by their bond (or the contemporary resonance of such infringements), Ferran uses the natural world to erase differences between the pair. In Lady Chatterley, nature is initially aligned with a working class existence, (in Parkin’s role as gamekeeper) but as Constance is drawn into his world, nature becomes a catalyst for the dissolution of class boundaries. There’s a scene in which the pair run naked together in the woods through pouring rain, seemingly at one with each other and their surroundings. However, unlike Parkin, Constance remains free to travel between the two worlds, a point that renders her appropriation of nature, and its erasure of class slightly problematic. Rather than point out this contradiction, Ferran depicts the natural world in overly idealised terms.
Yet, while the thematic focus and formal stylings of Ferran’s adaptation occasionally seem ill-considered there are still positives to be gleaned from the film. The performances of both Hands and Coulloc’h in the lead roles are commendably naturalistic. There’s an underplayed chemistry between the two of them, which in spite of their contrasting social backgrounds and appearances, achieves a degree of plausibility. The love scenes too are for the most part well handled; eschewing the Mills & Boon candlelight and violins approach for a more ‘realist’ sensibility. In one scene, the two lovers arrange flowers atop each other’s naked bodies. It’s a fairly daring move given the potential for parody, but Ferran keeps the moment playful without making the gesture seem too forced or twee.
Lady Chatterley makes demands of its audience, and so it should. It’s a work that strives to overturn contemporary depictions of sexuality both thematically and formally, and on those grounds alone the film is noteworthy. But ultimately Ferran’s nostalgic longing for the historically distant sensual trip of Lawrence’s work doesn’t quite hit the mark.
