The Daily Telegraph - Features
Has this sensual tale lost its erotic charge?
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
15 cert, 126 min
★★★★★
Dir Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
Starring Emma Corrin, Jack O’Connell, Matthew Duckett, Joely Richardson, Ella Hunt, Faye Marsay
Scandal has trailed Lady Constance Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover since well before DH Lawrence’s 1928 novel became a cause célèbre at its 1960 obscenity trial. This time, revisionist gallantry rides to her ladyship’s rescue in a fine, Netflix-bound adaptation from French director Laure de ClermontTonnerre. The heroine is a spoilt victim of her own appetites no longer. As played with luminous intelligence by The Crown’s Emma Corrin, headlining a film for the first time, she’s a thinking, feeling woman embroiled in a fateful love story by choice.
Lawrence drew Constance’s paramour, Oliver Mellors, as a strapping but misogynistic brute. In Jack O’Connell’s equally good performance, he’s a forlorn loner whose tenderness, more than his roughness, attracts Connie back for their cabin trysts. Constance’s bookish husband, Clifford (Matthew Duckett), disabled by war wounds, knows nothing of their burgeoning affair, but he’s so desperate for an heir that he plants the idea she might get impregnated by “the right kind of man” – so long as no one else finds out.
Lawrence charted this relationship through some of the most famously florid sex scenes in literature, which every previous version – from Ken Russell’s 1993 BBC series to the 2006 Frenchlanguage interpretation Lady Chatterley – has obviously taken pains to re-enact. Like the latter, this has a tasteful eroticism: both leads are heedlessly naked when larking about in the rain, while Oliver’s ministrations in this version include ardent cunnilingus. With their cries and sighs, the pair find solace in each other, while Isabelle Summers’s busy score blends forest sounds with chirruping, as if the whole natural world is tuning in.
It’s a smart re-edit of Lawrence, and cast smartly, too: Russell’s own Lady Chatterley, Joely Richardson, is splendidly sincere as Clifford’s caregiver Mrs Bolton, who treats Connie with protective motherliness. It’s as if we were watching a benison of goodwill passed from one actress to the other, granting the character not only greater agency this time, but greater peace.
In truth, the film doesn’t totally ignite as an emotional experience. That might partly come down to the photographic choices by Benoît Delhomme, which push a chilly blue light, meaning we never exactly feel as though spring is in the air. And while O’Connell’s ruffian vulnerability remains charismatic, and Corrin’s waifish physicality and fits of pique are beautifully controlled, these two somehow persist in coming across like strangers. What was ever-soshocking in times gone by is now classy, respectable – and tamed.
In cinemas now and on Netflix from December 2