Emma Corrin and Jack O’Connell carry this idealistic, moving French version of DH Lawrence’s transgressive novel
Here is a movie that could so easily collapse into self-satire, especially at the first sneery-knowing intonation of the word “milady”, a phrase probably now most associated with Parker from Thunderbirds. But the commitment and passion of its two lead performers, Emma Corrin and Jack O’Connell, carries this new version of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the actor turned director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre finds the keynote of idealism. The film is never shy of eroticism and full-on sex, if sometimes going for a slightly quaint soft-focus approach. But Clermont-Tonnerre is never in any doubt that this is a love story. The last adaptation of any note was from another French film-maker, Pascale Ferran’s flawed Lady Chatterley (based on an earlier version of the book). Perhaps it takes a French and not a British director to respond to Lawrence’s forbidden tale of forbidden love.
It is the middle of the first world war and Constance Reid (Corrin) is the beautiful and impulsive young woman of upper-class birth and progressive views who, after a chequered emotional past, honestly believes herself to be in love with Sir Clifford Chatterley; they get married before he has to return to the front, hardly knowing each other at all. At the war’s end, he is a gloomier figure, using a wheelchair after a terrible war injury, and it is in a sombre mood that the new Lady Chatterley is to arrive with him at Wragby, his vast country estate, paid for by the sweated labour at his colliery.
There, she is alienated from the friends he invites up from London for the weekend. Sir Clifford is a shallow, meretricious figure: after dabbling in writing fiction, he throws himself into making his colliery even more profitable by laying off some miners and exploiting the rest more ruthlessly. This impotent plutocrat is coldly obsessed with producing an heir, making it clear to the bewildered Constance that he will permit her to have a discreet affair if that produces the correct result. As it happens, Constance has become obsessed with the handsome gamekeeper, Mellors (vehemently played by O’Connell, who maintains his character’s dignity). He is the only person in her life capable of human sympathy.
