Lady Chatterley

Somehow fittingly, just as there's more than one version of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (ca. 1928), there's more than one version of Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley (2006). Confusing, I know, but John Thomas and Lady Jane, not published (so far as I can tell -- even this is hard to verify completely) until 1972, provides an alternate version which is, via Lady Chatterley et l'homme des bois  [Lady Chatterley and the Man of the Woods] (1977), the basis for Ferran's movie versions.

Okay, so what's the big deal?  This is not far afield from either Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (ca.1857) or Leo Tolstoy's  Anna Karenina / Анна Каренина (ca. 1877), right?  Well, it is and it isn't. For one thing, Lawrence incorporates the industrial slaughter of the Great War of 1914-1918 into Lady Chatterley's arc, which is thus more modern in its setting. 

Lady Chatterley's husband, a mine owner made an invalid by the war, spends part of his time wheeling around in something like a riding lawnmower/wheelchair, complete with combustible engine. Besides that, reading aloud about the Trojan War and acting the aristocrat, he's not able to do much. This leaves emotional and physical space for Lady Chatterley (his wife) to meet up with the gamekeeper from time to time. 

So that's the big deal: a modern twist on an enduring -- and appealing -- trope.













Pascale Ferran (the director) herself notes why she preferred the version she chose to adapt: "[T]he gamekeeper is a much wilder, more sensitive character. He’s a very solitary man, with a complicated relationship to speech. He really should have been a miner, but he didn’t enjoy being around people. He prefers being alone in the woods like a hermit.” 

Ferran, in this same interview with Anne Cammon from which the above is quoted, further observes: The two [main] characters come out deeply transformed, both in themselves and in their vision of the world. They come out freer and braver, and maybe more intelligent . . . At the beginning of the film Constance [i.e. Lady Chatterley] is sort of like a 19th-century woman, and by the end of the film she’s more like a woman from the late 20th-century . . ." 

For the entire interview, please see The Pascale Ferran Interview by Anne Cammon, The Quarterly Conversation:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-pascale-ferran-interview













And oh yeah, the movie(s) is (are) great, just like the book(s)!  Not for everyone, but besides death and taxes, what is?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.