It was an exceptionally warm evening—far too lovely to spend in a dark room. A rare day of summer weather in the Bay Area and there we were, about to spend three hours indoors with hundreds of equally hot bodies, in a cinema—a neighborhood one at that—hardly renowned for its modern air conditioning installation.

We could have waited for the film’s general release, or worse yet, Netflix. But to see it at the film festival gave it a certain cachet, and echoed the novel’s original publication (only in Italy) in 1929: we would be the first in this country to see the full, unexpurgated version.

Lady Chatterley—and her lover—is something of a cliché in the Anglo-Saxon world. Who does not have—certainly among the older generations—memories of furtively thumbing through pages of a worn paperback in the 1960s, when the book was finally released in its entirety? If you grew up in a Puritanical household, it was sometimes the only way to smuggle a graphic description of the sexual act into the house. My older brother was guilty in the case of my Puritanical family; by the time I found it on his bookshelf—1963, ‘64?—the binding had split. As for the relevant passages: I didn’t understand much, except that there was that bad word, fuck, quite a lot. I was a good little Puritanical girl, and very ignorant. And that was probably my first reading of what sex was. Nowadays Lawrence’s novel would probably fail to find a publisher: too romantic, too predictable, not shocking or nihilistic or edgy[1] enough. Not enough body fluids. A definite cliché—to which, one might add, he probably unwittingly contributed.

The fact that it is a French director, Pascale Ferran, who has made an admirable new adaptation of the novel is telling. For a start, perhaps the book was never a succès à scandale in France—what, after all, is so scandalous about an aristocratic lady having sex with her husband’s gamekeeper, unless it is the fact that she has transgressed the barriers of class? (An underlying reason for the scandal in Britain, too, no doubt). So Ms. Ferran and her actors presumably had no lurid childhood memories of flashlights and titters under the covers after dark. Or I may be wrong. But let’s start with the idea that the director and producers truly loved Lawrence’s novel, for its intrinsic literary merit, and saw its potential as a film.

Apparently there were considerable difficulties in raising sufficient funds—it took twelve years to get the project off the ground. Also, the film did not do well commercially at first: it would take the praise it garnered at film festivals to give it the nudge into the mainstream. After all, how many people would be prepared to sit through three hours of a story that many of them might already know? Three hours with no suspense, and a plot that can be summed up in a sentence? And, according to IMDB, there have already been at least four film versions. But, despite all these arguments, the film was made, and eventually went on to win a number of French Césars, or Oscars for French language films.

The story has gained from being transposed to an unfamiliar rural area of France. It feels curiously out of focus, as if a sort of flou artistique were transforming the décors and the characters, because we know this is France pretending to be England and French people pretending to be British aristocrats and their servants. And this all works to the good: instead of feeling we are seeing yet another Masterpiece Theatre or Merchant Ivory production, we concentrate on the story, on the acting, on the cinematography. The language, too, changes everything: while we lose Lawrence’s regional dialect (tha and thee), and his gamekeeper’s rustic eloquence with four letter words, we gain the French use of vous and tu which works more successfully than the “tha” and “thee” would in an English-language film, in these times. How formal the two lovers are, most of the time, not to mention Constance Chatterley with her husband Clifford; how much more intimate then when finally the word tu is used between the lovers. It is like a confession, an acknowledgment; a brave transgression.

The ultimate transgression, of course, is the sex. Sex has been very poorly portrayed in the cinema over recent years. Either it is merely hinted at, or prettified beyond belief; or it is unnecessarily violent and graphic (edgy?) and loveless. In this version the sex is believable, almost documentary, and yet it does what it has to do to make the viewer believe that these lovers are transforming sex to love, and are being transformed by their lovemaking. The eroticism is palpable—the temperature in the theatre seemed to rise several times during the screening—but so is the tenderness.[2] The actors are refreshingly ordinary, certainly unknown; they have imperfect (read: normal) bodies, and once your eye adjusts, you feel a bemused, empathetic shyness, as if they were actually kissing in front of you like lovers on a street corner. Some of Lawrence’s bolder descriptions make it to the screen; whether those scenes will make it to general release in the (increasingly) Puritanical United States is another matter; but they too add to the depth and warmth of the story. I believe the fact that the film was made by a woman may have had something to do with this: women often seem to be more at ease with the body, male or female, as a part of life, and the film shows something like an eagerness to convey the very physicality of the lovers in both tender and natural ways.

There were a few titters in the theatre at the wrong time; no doubt there will always be those who are embarrassed by intimacy and seek to ridicule it. Or who would have preferred clinical sex scenes without emotion or playfulness. What I could not help thinking as I was watching the film, gently absorbed by the long shots of Constance Chatterley walking—or running—through the woods to meet her lover, was how all of us must have known moments of intimacy and reverie like those portrayed in the film. It is simply part of being human; we are made that way—how else could an upper-class Englishwoman ever agree to making love to a “servant”?! So I felt vaguely sad for the tittering, restless souls in the audience: had they never experienced anything like that? Did they not believe such love exists? Or were they bitter, skeptical, cynical, refusing to remember?

Lady Chatterley restored my faith in the power of human connection—not that I’d ever really lost it.

---

[1] If you hate this word, as I do, please join my Hateful Words Club: others being: team spirit, issue, proactive, stunning.[2] (Which, I had forgotten, is one of the titles Lawrence thought of using for the novel).