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Decades of "forbidden novel" status have given D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover a special place in pop culture and perhaps done it a disservice.
If you ever had to study it in college, you know it's not just about a rich, dissatisfied woman getting it off repeatedly with the gardener in an English estate (that would be too much like the plot of a classy porn film). It's actually about class struggle, about the injustice of a presumption that some are born to rule, and about mankind's native sensuality.
Lawrence actually took three shots at the same story. Director Pascal Ferran's long, odd and tastefully erotic French version is based on the second, with the prosaic title John Thomas and Lady Jane.
The oddness in Ferran's take really springs from its Frenchness. There's something about the language that doesn't convey the repressiveness of Edwardian English life. Nor does the movie waste much time pondering class struggle (it is nearly two hours old before anyone even mentions the innate hierarchy of human society or a member of the proletariat ends up on screen).
But there's plenty of foliage and greenery, and sex therein. From the opening moments, when the unfulfilled housewife Constance (Marina Hands) catches a glimpse of the half-clothed gameskeeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc'h) washing himself, and then goes home to examine her naked body, we know Ferran's take on the novel.
Sir Clifford, Constance's husband, is a crippled World War I veteran whose infirmities are meant to suggest the lie of the aristocracy's natural place above robust workers. Again, that suggestion is there, but it doesn't take up much of Lady Chatterley's near three-hour running time.
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Thinking back, it's hard to remember what it is that makes the movie so long, other than its languid pace and long visual ruminations on the beauty of nature. It's certainly not twists of plot. Constance's meetings with Parkin carry on under the excuse of her daily flower-picking ritual. And as she waltzes in nightly with her hands full of daffodils, Clifford seems unsuspecting, or perhaps simply uncaring.
In fact, the lack of dramatic tension is yet another reason the movie seems as long as it is. At no time are the couple in danger of being found out, and there is no moral sense that anybody "needs" to be punished for this adulterous relationship, either by society or fate.
The acting is all good.
Hands has won awards in France and at Tribeca for her open-eyed, innocent portrayal. And Coulloc'h portrays a rather more sensitive Parkin than the rough-hewn brute he's usually taken to be.
As for the sex, well, much of it is clothed -- although there's something about a garter that kids today... well, never mind.
(This film is rated 18-A)