Is it still possible to take Lady Chatterley's Loverseriously? The key elements in DH Lawrence's once scandalous novel - posh lady rolls around with burly gamekeeper - could now be regarded as a creation myth for the soft porn industry.
It's difficult to consider the action in the novel without remembering all those plumbers, cable guys and pool boys who have acted beyond the call of duty when summoned to the homes of Swedish housewives.
Pascale Ferran, thus, deserves our respect for daring to take on this most iconic of literary romances (and not just because she's French). Her film, adapted from the second of three published drafts of the book, has its flaws. But, unlike earlier versions starring Sylvia Kristel and Joely Richardson, it never presses its stars into abandoning their dignity.
It helps that Ferran has cast two actors with faces you might really encounter in a rainy glade. Marina Hands, who makes a middle-class rambler of Lady Chatterley, expresses her sexual frustration through furrowed brows rather than uncontrollable panting. The burly Jean-Louis Coulloc'h, a Gallic amalgam of Oliver Stone and John Prescott, is the first of Constance's cinematic lovers who looks like he might know one end of a pheasant from another. Assisted by pretty, pastoral photography from Julien Hirsch, they manage to hurry away all memories of the book's many parodies and travesties.
Still, the film, which won five gongs at the recent César Awards, never fully engages and certainly doesn't justify its mighty length. The decision to retain the English setting is one problem: the rustic houses have a few too many shutters, the dynamics of the class system are somewhat skewed, and the attempts to render the gamekeeper's accent phonetically in the subtitles fail pathetically.
There is, moreover, now something rather preposterous about Lawrence's desire to make us all one with the squirrels, the trees and the puddles. Once dangerous, Lady Chatterley's Loverhas lived long enough to become terminally quaint.
