Review of Lady Chatterley

The directress, Pascale Ferran, made D.H. Lawrence's masterpiece so French that it becomes some kind of sentimentalese fable about some lovemaking in the woods. You can imagine that D.H. Lawrence himself turned three times in the mouth of his grave and burped at least twenty times because he felt a whole flock of French geese strutting and dancing the Carmagnole on his grave. D.H. Lawrence is iconoclastic and as such no one gets through his hands unscratched. No luck, no hope no future for the son of a miner, the wife of a miner or a miner himself because they will only know poverty and repression, including the repression of their passions that will have to become illegal and even criminal if necessary to step over social censorship. But no luck either for the boss of the mine or the aristocrat who has nothing to do except counting his bonds and shares because they are unable to feel and experience any emotion, passion, sentimental adventure. They are British to the core. No sex please. But the film gets rid of all that dark vision and transform one of the tenser and denser tale about social segregation in England into a love affair under the rain in the middle of woods, and I can tell you that these woods are not going to move in any other way. No Lady Macbeth in the wings please. I have nothing against the importation of an English masterpiece into the French vision, but when the French vision is reduced to sentimentalese mishmash and melo-non-dramatic hogwash I regret to be living where I am living. The film is too long and often close to boring and it is not two or three scrutinizing shots of the man's sex by the voyeuristic camera that will make the drug go down, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, or something like that, is obviously unknown from our directress. No magic, no drama, no tragedy, only a bland tasteless yarn that tends onto a yawn.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne