Lady Chatterley
Directed by Pascale Ferran
When director Pascale Ferran gets to the sex scenes in Lady Chatterley, it’s not the stroke book sensationalism contemporary audiences might be waiting for, but careful and humane. Her actors, Marina Hands as Connie, the repressed wife of a wealthy British veteran wounded in WWI, and Jean-Louis Coulloc’h as Parkin, the gameskeeper on the Chatterley estate, have art class, nature-study bodies. This is also different from the unembarrassed yet chic nudity of Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse. Ferran’s body consciousness is realistic, not glamorous. She stays true to the spirit of D.H. Lawrence’s original story by showing sex as part of the personality of characters who represent the social strictures of their day.
With their clothes eventually off, Hands and Coulloc’h become beautiful in revelatory ways. Hands has freckled breasts, and mouths have crooked, slightly yellow teeth. Parkin’s round peasant’s face is also rugged. As they expose themselves to each other and develop more emotional intimacy, she loses her solemnity and sullen brutishness goes out of his demeanor.
Ferran pays as much attention to nature as David Lean did in the momentous Ryan’s Daughter sex scene. The prominent connection of behavior to environment prevents this from being a conventional liberation story. In Lawrence, nature and sex are part of a combined vision, not a romantic cliché. In an age long past Lean’s humanism, it took a French filmmaker to restore Lawrence’s insight into human nature. Lady Chatterley is scrupulous about the female and male struggle toward sensual and moral awareness. The Sibelius and Bach score, the artful variation of voice-over narration, then a home movie-style interlude, share the postmodern awareness of Patrice Chereau’s Gabrielle and Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen. Yet, Ferran very simply anticipates a future for human relationships with a rush of man-to-woman communication that makes the film—despite its excessive length (nearly three hours)—totally winning. Ending with the best love scene since George Washington is not proof of Ferran’s innocence but of emotional truth.
