French adaptation of the second Lady Chatterley novel ('John Thomas and Lady Jane') joins the queue of failed adaptations of Lawrence's final novel.
Irresistible the temptation to make a filmed version with carte blanche for heaps of 'justified' bucolic sex in the English countryside, but why French? The actress (Marina Hands) is lovely enough, fit to play lead in the film of Audrey Tatou's life, but no Connie, who is unquestionably English, plump, and sensual, not fey and boyish. The Clifford is about right, puny, scornful, meagre as a man (Hippolyte Girardot). But Parkin is all wrong. Rufus Sewell should play Parkin or Mellors, a re-run of his turn in 'Cold Comfort Farm'. Not this middle-aged grump, the bizarrely named Jean-Louis Coullo'ch, who moved the apostrophe in his surname for this film's credit to Coulloc'h.
No, this won't do. It's plain and boring, and more than a little redolent of soft-core. The book is full of dialogue, arguments, discussions, debates and verbal love-making, but this scriptmaker has stripped out everything not absolutely essential to pushing the plot forward, a good rule for film-making maybe, but not for adaptations of poetic fiction. There are long scenes where these fascinating characters say nothing to each other at all, when there is so much to cram into the 135-minute running-time. As for French actors playing characters with English names, referring to English place-names (Wragby, Uthwaite), this only heightens the sense of how absurd the whole project is. How much wiser it might have been to produce a French re-telling of the story, 'Rules Of The Game' meets 'Diary of a Chambermaid', give all the characters French names, and call the whole thing 'The Game-Keeper'. The recent BBC adaptations ('Daniel Deronda', 'Jane Eyre', 'Persuasion', 'P&P') have set the bar very high for filmed literary classics. Work like this looks very pedestrian and plain by comparison.
I'd like to see a 'Lady Chatterley' without sex scenes. That would test a director and make them get everything else right.