The French Lieutenant’s Woman
John Fowles isn’t read much anymore, but he was a marvelously inventive writer able to pull off labyrinthine plots that left you dazed in the best sense of the word. Nowhere was Fowles’ skill more evident than in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” his 1969 novel about a fraught romance between a 19th century British gentleman and a former governess seeking her independence.
Fowles incorporates the best techniques of Victorian literature and then puts a mind-boggling post-modern spin on it by offering the reader three alternate endings. It took playwright Harold Pinter to figure out how to make that plausible in a movie — a task that had tripped up other screenwriters. Pinter’s solution is to run parallel story lines, one following Fowles’ story about the gentleman and the governess and the other a contemporary story involving the personal lives of the two actors portraying these characters.
Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons appear in both roles. A way to quickly tell where you are is to look at Streep’s hair — it is long and curled as a 19th century woman and worn in a breezy short hairdo as a modern-day actress. She and Irons give spectacular performances, able to switch gears by showing little habits that distinguish one character they’re playing from another. Their sex scenes seem startlingly realistic — almost shocking when set in the 19th century. Apparently Victorians were capable of such passion. Streep masters a lower-class British accent, one of the first of her many accents.
Director Karel Reisz (“Sweet Dreams,” “Who’ll Stop the Rain”) uses the rocky seafront surrounding Lyme to set an ominous tone. At any time someone could fall and be swept away in cascading waves.
This is an intelligent film that demands a level of intelligence from audiences in a way that movies rarely do anymore. Stay with it and you will be rewarded with two endings (evidently Pinter couldn’t figure out how to include a third) that come at you in a rush and make you rethink everything that came before.