In the film Lady Chatterley’s Lover, from Netflix, love is a leap of faith. Connie Reid (Emma Corrin) is bohemian, bourgeois and modern. A true symbol of the roaring 20s in Europe. For this woman full of appetites — and questions — about life, love is unknown. But more than that, it is also a territory of nuances. The umpteenth adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Loverby DH Lawrence, dedicates a special interest to that premise and bases its effectiveness on that gray quality.
La Connie by director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre is much more than a vehicle for deepen about desire as a deep impulse of freedom. It is, at the same time, a journey through the secret motivations that create unknown emotional scenarios.
On the other hand, the baronet Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett) becomes her obsession and not only because of the feelings he arouses in her. Her lover, and after her her husband, is a man capable of intriguing this restless woman, overwhelmed by questions but with the restlessness of discovering her.
One of the great contributions of David Magee’s script is to focus the necessary attention on how the couple sees each other. What is the thread of erotic, sexual and intellectual tension that sustains them.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
During the first ten minutes of the film Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the tone of the plot becomes clear. This is not an erotic story or, at least, not exclusively based on lust or irrepressible desire. Rather, it is a journey to sex through intimacy, which is constructed through elaborate ideas related to identity. It may seem trite until director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre looks at sexuality through solitude. All the characters in the film are deeply alone, isolated, marginalized. But, even so, it is not a desolate territory, but pure incomprehension, linked to the idea of the individual and privacy.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover It’s a stormy love story
In fact, the director builds a vision about the need and the search for meaning that goes beyond the mere idea of the physical. It is then that the accident that leaves Cliff disabled becomes a fragment of history into speculation.
Connie wonders about their future., especially, on how to understand oneself now that they cannot be analyzed thanks to desire. He could be, he could find him, he could need him, Connie tells herself, drunk with anger, unsure how to deal with the wounded Cliff. “But I don’t want to.”
But when she meets game warden Oliver Mellors (Jack O’Connell), the question of erotic need is posed in a new way. Lady Chatterley’s Lover makes an eloquent and well-constructed transition between spaces of pain, mourning and, later, rebirth. All through a perception of the sexual that astonishes for its subtlety and, at the same time, its intelligent quality as a sensory element.
The pains of love, the comfort of desire
During the first ten minutes of the movie Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the tone of the argument becomes clear. This is not an erotic story or, at least, not exclusively based on lust or irrepressible desire. Rather, it is a journey to sex through intimacy, which is constructed through elaborate ideas related to identity.
It may seem trite until the director — known for her debut mustang of 2019 — analyzes sexuality through loneliness. All the characters in Lady Chatterley’s Lover they are profoundly alone, isolated, marginalized. But, even so, it is not a desolate territory, but pure incomprehension, linked to the idea of the individual and privacy.
Of course, it is a risky step for the adaptation of a story known for its risque scenes or judged to be pornographic. Of course, in the new version of DH Lawrence’s work there are sexual scenes, as well as the inevitable erotic component. But the director builds the story through questions that carnal necessity doesn’t answer immediately. Who are we, when experiencing love? What does the need, the longing, the search for a voracious need of the other take away from us?
Magee’s script takes the time for a careful exploration of that premise. In fact, the most interesting Lady Chatterley’s Lover it is this new approach, the way in which the narrative asks concrete questions about carnality. Sexual anxiety — a curious term for what drives his characters — is everywhere. It is essential to understand the film. But also to provide a special weight and meaning to the perception of the good and the moral. Particularly in a story in which the border between both things is blurred.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover it is also an erotic fairy tale
This reinvention of the need for unsatisfied love, turned into an essential intellectual journey, has its own brilliance. Despite the fact that the script repeatedly underlines obvious ideas or, in any case, their importance. For his second half, Lady Chatterley’s Lover It loses a little of the spring vibrancy of its opening stretch, but it’s still astounding in its innocence.
Connie and Oliver are star-crossed lovers with no future. Cliff is a cruel observer from a distance of the way his wife breaks spaces and builds new ones. In the middle of this fast, overwhelming and precise dynamic, Lady Chatterley’s Lover it gets more and more elegantpainful, an open wound that meditates on love.
But not the romantic or emotional, but the powerful, deep and demanding. For its grand final scene (perhaps, one of the best of all the novel’s adaptations), the movie shows its true momentum. Also her growth and her version of beauty in a new dimension. Perhaps its highest and most powerful point in the middle of a narrative that will inevitably end in tragedy.