Lady Chatterley.

From a French adaptation in 1955 with Danielle Darrieux through, let's say, less auspicious reworkings at the hands of Ken Russell, Sylvia Kristel and dozens of others, DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover hasn't fared too well on film, notes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. "The newest Chatterley - a nearly three-hour French-language adaptation, directed by Pascale Ferran - effectively wipes the slate clean," he announces. "Lady Chatterley, which opens Friday, is both sober and sensual, not just a world away from the high-toned smut of its predecessors but also, in its directness and simplicity, an anomaly in the elaborately ornamented genre of the costume drama. In France it has won widespread critical acclaim and five César Awards."

Updated through 6/23.

"Dice it any way you want, this material was, is, and will always be pretty cheap," counters Jason Clark at Slant. "[I]n the pretentious, nondescript hands of Ferran, you're left with a pastoral douche commercial... Since the movie has no expressive qualities, it all just sits there on screen, like a limp phallus."

"I found the first half-hour a snooze, but once I adjusted to the movie's rhythms, I was completely enraptured," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Ferran weaves the love affair into nature, but not in the mystical, sanctified manner of Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. The look is rough-hewn, the feeling casual yet supremely alert."

Earlier: Emmanuel Burdeau in Cahiers du cinéma.

Updates, 6/20: Cathy Erway in the L Magazine: "While some of the pedestrian English gruffness of [Jean-Louis] Coulloc'h's Parkin may be lost in translation, Ferran eschews class divide as a major motive for Connie's [Marina Hands] carnal impulses. The subtle power play between the lovers instead becomes so modern, in fact, that you may not realize how the time has passed."

"The montage-based spectacle of the world joyously blossoming along with the lovers' libidos was the basis for two previous movies that provocatively glossed Lawrence's story: Czech director Gustav Machaty's famously uninhibited Ecstasy, the outrage of 1932, and, 20 years later, Douglas Sirk's necessarily repressed—but more subversive—American version, All That Heaven Allows, J Hoberman reminds us. "Ferran revels in the objective correlative as a means to restore something of the novel's archaic essence. Lady Chatterley's Lover is, after all, a straightforward adult fairy tale about a spellbound princess who wanders into the deep woods and discovers the enchanted rustic cottage where the solitary Green Man makes his home.... This is not so much a love story (and even less a story about love) than it is a movie of passionate loveliness."

Also in the Voice: Leslie Camhi talks with Ferran.

For those in France and Germany: Lady Chatterley will be broadcast Friday evening at 8:40 on arte.

Updates, 6/21: "I defy anyone to watch the closing scene, when Constance and Parkin speak their hearts, without misting up," writes Erica Abeel, introducing her interview with Ferran for indieWIRE.

"Ferran very simply anticipates a future for human relationships with a rush of man-to-woman communication that makes the film - despite its excessive length (nearly three hours) - totally winning," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Ending with the best love scene since George Washington is not proof of Ferran's innocence but of emotional truth."

"It's not just a film in the French language; it's also a French interpretation of a fundamentally English story about class and sex and liberation," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "As presented by Julien Hirsch's moody camerawork, the lush, dripping forests of Clifford Chatterley's estate, so suggestive of somethingness, don't look quite like any English woodlands I've ever seen. While Ferran certainly imbues this landscape with a sort of immanent eroticism, there's also a philosophical, almost diagrammatic element to her film. This is DH Lawrence rendered in the metric system."

With few exceptions, "there's no sense that these characters exist among 'the ruins' of the cataclysmic 'tragic age' Lawrence paints in the book's very first sentences," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at Reverse Shot. "So when Lady Chatterley winds up in the arms of the quiet, Brandoesque Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc'h) nothing is at stake."

Updates, 6/22: "In stripping Lady Chatterley of some of its mystique, Ms Ferran has rediscovered both the novel's originality and the source of its durable appeal, which is not salaciousness but candor," writes AO Scott in the NYT. "She has made a love story that stands on its own, a film whose imaginative freedom perfectly matches the liberation experienced by its heroine."

"Ferran does supply sex as well as sexual symbolism, but the two are equally placid and ruminative, and the Better Homes and Gardens visual approach makes for a mighty sleepy film," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Nicole Ankowski at Nerve: "I admit my MTV-addled brain mometarily cringed when I realized the running time was almost three hours long, but Ferran's ability to immerse her lens in Lady Chatterley's woodsy otherworld makes each minute worthwhile."

Update, 6/23: "Lady Chatterley. Is. One. Of. The. Most. Sluggish. Erotic-Lit. Movies. Ever." Writes. Nick Schager. At Cinematical.

Posted by dwhudson at June 19, 2007 11:47 AM