Writer: David Magee
Director: Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
Following the Persuasion backfire, Netflix has a lot to prove with its interpretation of classic texts so there is considerable interest in David Magee’s adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, currently screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2022. Eschewing the tele-theatrics and with a proper understanding of its heroine, D.H. Lawrence’s tale becomes far more than a story of unruly passion between the classes, this is the true love story that the author intended.
Married to Clifford Chatterley, life after the First World War becomes imprisoning for his young wife Connie who finds tending to his injuries and his growing self-importance stifling. At the family home, Wragby Hall, she meets gamekeeper Oliver Mellors and a passionate affair begins, but rank and judgement will keep them apart as scandal comes calling.
Once considered one of the most outrageous stories every written, Netflix has taken good care to fairly represent the scale and complexity of Lawrence’s beautiful novel that explores the old and new worlds colliding in the aftermath of conflict through the romantic and sexual awakening of its protagonist. This wonderfully progressive novel is an important female-led narrative and adaptor David Magee gives it a largely faithful and meaningful screen transfer.
Director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre spends time establishing the scenario and its aftermath, creating three chapters that follow Connie’s perspective primarily through the early days of her marriage and the distance that builds with the man she was once happy to marry. There is some expansion of Lawrence’s scenarios, the addition of some pre-Wragby scenes, a longer period of the affair largely shown in montage and the dramatisation of finale events previously captured in Mellor’s letter. But there is a certain spirit of Lawrence in these embellishments and an attempt to be true to the psychology of the novel and its characters written by someone with a clear understanding and respect for the material, even including a lot of Lawrence’s dialogue.
Emma Corrin is excellent as Connie, not quite an ingenue but looking for some wider meaning in her life while trying to navigate her modern, social equality attitudes in an old-fashioned world of nobless oblige and self-restraint. Corrin makes her character’s slow attachment to Mellors and her hesitancy about the consequences quite credible but as the feeling between them grows, her Connie visible blooms and her confidence increases.
Lawrence gives us very little insight into Mellors, a man who earned promotion during the war but holds a quite different world view to Clifford. Jack O’Connell plays him as a man almost reluctantly reawakening to physical experience but nonetheless steadfast and worthy of Connie’s trust. Matthew Duckett’s Clifford captures the growing pomposity of his character while Joely Richardson – a former Lady Chatterley herself – makes an excellent Mrs Bolton.
Netflix can rest easy after the Persuasion backlash because this is an admirable two-hour adaptation of Lawrence’s novel that seeks to understand female sexuality and the universality of love regardless of era, class and public approbation.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2022.