Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10932 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-04-14
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 161 minutes

Synopsis
French director Pascale Ferran brings D.H. Lawrence's second and lesser-known version of LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER to the screen. Approaching three hours in length, the film explores its protagonist's emotional transformation. Set in England in the 1920s, the film begins with our heroine, played by Marina Hands, saying goodbye to her husband, Clifford, who is heading off to war. Left behind on their grand country estate, Constance gets the first taste of the loneliness and isolation she will later become accustomed to when he returns home paralysed. Suddenly reduced to the role of nurse, the young woman cares for her invalid husband and listlessly putters about the large property, desperately dreaming of escape. She finds this outlet in Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc'h), the deceptively brutish gamekeeper down the hill. Sceptical of Constance at first, Parkin begrudgingly produces an extra set of keys to his shed when asked, opening the door to an affair that will awaken something deeply repressed in both parties. Clifford inadvertently encourages his wife by dismissing her boredom and unhappiness as unimportant. When the unspoken tension between Parkin and Constance eventually explodes into a fiery sexual encounter, the two embark on a journey of sexual awakening and personal discovery. LADY CHATTERLEY is beautifully filmed, providing an extremely detailed account of the heroine's visual surroundings. Scenery functions symbolically to show how Constance blooms in the aura of Parkin's love. But as passionate and subversive as their affair is, the reality of their social positions is always present, with visual clues creating a sense of constant threat to the relationship. When Constance goes off on a carefree, extravagant holiday with her fashionable sister and others from her own class, homemade-style footage of her trip contrasts with the controlled way in which her home life is captured, and demonstrates just how far she is from that world. The film's ending is rather open-ended, suggesting several possible outcomes by calling into question how much the early-20th-century social structure will matter in the end.

Customer Reviews

Not what Lawrence intended..................
This is a brave effort to bring 'John Thomas & Lady Jane' to the screen, but it is significantly flawed in realisation. My problems with the film are listed below:

1. It fails to fully bring out Lawrence's despair over the way he believed that industrialization had destroyed the hopes and dreams of the working man.

2. The gamekeeper is not the lean, pale man described in the book and he is also too passive. Connie does not really show the character development required as she becomes sexually liberated and released from her 'dead' relationship with Clifford.

3. Clifford is not irascible enough as even in this version of the novel he is an intense and frustrated man who is devastated by his injuries and rails against the world around him. The Director has failed to draw this out from the performance here and we get little of Clifford's contempt for those of a lower class.

4. The French dialogue in the film obviously cannot capture the way Lawrence uses local accents to emphasis differences in class in his stories.

Overall, I admire the French production team in tackling this, but honestly, this particular Lawrence story is too English in its content to 'travel' well hence my mark of 3 stars for this. It is well photographed and filmed and the sexual content is carefully and tenderly played by the two main actors, but the characters are all too low key.

a triumph
Don't listen to this imbecile!

For those of you with receptive souls - buy this film immediately and savour the sheer quality, the heartfelt performances, the stunning changes of seasons and the delicate beauty of actress Marina Hinds.

The length didn't bother me in the slightest, in fact I wish it was longer, and as for the comment about the actor/actress not being beautiful enough, that is the masterstroke. The director has deliberately made them real people, not pretty, not glossy, just normal people, and it's all the more shattering for it.

purchase and savour.

pay attention, reviewers!
have just seen this. at the beginning it said: based on the novel 'john thomas and lady jane'. having never heard of such a book, i thought this was a little joke by the film makers, referring to the names the couple give to their parts in the book.

i therefore watched it as a version of 'lady chatterley's lover'. i observed that the gamekeeper's character was quite different from the book, as were various other details, and in a big way, the end. nevertheless, i was quite prepared to accept all this, in spite of being a fan of the book, as i accepted the makers' words that this was 'based on'. in fact i quite enjoyed the differences i have already cited, in this version. and the gradually developing affair is beautifully handled and portrayed.

filmically, largely sans intrusive musical score, and taken at a slow burn through wonderful images of nature, it was a pleasure.

subsequently, i discovered that there really is a second book, by lawrence, by this name and containing the differences that appear in the film!

so all the negative reviews here, mainly posited on the dissimilarity to 'lady chatterley's lover', are out of order on two counts. (being 'based on', and even actually a different book.)

as for the complaints about the characters not being 'beautiful' enough - puh-lease! this minor escape from the media body police was very welcome.

and adjacent to this, the complaint that he wasn't attractive enough to warrant her response - again, puh-lease! she was a passionate woman, living without sex and the touch of a man, his body turned her on (her, dear viewer, it didn't have to turn you on), and he was the only feasible sexual prospect in her world! so - a bit fanciful in either version, but it is fiction, and beside that, sex can be a powerful drive to strange/ dangerous behaviour.