Lady Chatterley’s Lover Review: A Loyal to a Fault Adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Classic

Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover proves, if nothing else, how resistant D.H. Lawrence’s fiction remains to adaptation. However faithfully the film transposes the plot and themes of the source material, it struggles to capture the spirit, ironing out Lawrence’s modernity-skeptical modernism and losing sight of his poetic vision. This would be of no consequence if the film supplied a vision of its own, but aside from throwing in a few sex scenes that are retrofitted to align with contemporary notions of good sex, it barely stands out from most period dramas, opening itself to unfavorable comparison with the novel.

Of Lawrence’s major novels, Lady Chatterley’s Lover should, in theory, lend itself easiest to adaptation, more so than ever now that sex scenes in film are commonplace enough to anesthetize all but the most puritanical of eyebrows. It doesn’t take place over several generations, unlike The Rainbow. Neither does it push language to its limits to find expression for conflicting levels of consciousness, as in Women In Love. Although Ken Russell’s film version of Women In Love, adapted by Larry Kramer, takes more formal risks than de Clermont-Tonnerre’s film, such as turning the image on its side for one scene, it also never convincingly transmutes the intense lyrical abstraction of Lawrence’s prose into film.

Though David Magee’s screenplay dramatizes bits of plot that are only alluded to in the book, substituting montage and letters read in voiceover for summary, it sticks to the same basic story. Constance “Connie” Reid (Emma Corrin), who comes from an educated, bohemian London background, marries the aristocratic Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett) just before he sets off to fight in World War I. He returns paralyzed from the waist down, and the two move into his family estate at Wragby. For a time, Connie seems satisfied enough supporting Clifford’s writing career, but sexual frustration sets in and she begins a love affair with the groundskeeper, Oliver Mellors (Jack O’Connell), while Clifford becomes more involved in running the coal mines in the nearby village of Tevershall. Sexually awakened and in love, Connie gets pregnant and the affair is eventually found out, to scandalous consequences.

Like Russell before her, de Clermont-Tonnerre finds no visual equivalent for Lawrence’s unmistakable prose style. For one, the film doesn’t directly show what Lawrence describes in such vivid language: the despoilation of the Midlands and deadening exploitation of the miners at the hands of Clifford and his class, which form the dismal panorama against which Connie and Mellors’s revivifying sexual discoveries unfold. What depiction of class conflict there is in the film takes place mostly on the level of dialogue—undercut by the sumptuous costuming and aristocratic set-dressing typical of period pieces. And yet, Mellors’s code-switching, in the book, between Derbyshire vernacular and “proper” English is dropped, as he only speaks in dialect.

Only a couple of scenes actually dramatize class conflict. Early on, Connie visits Tevershall for the first time on May Day and witnesses the villagers dancing around a Maypole as a small contingent of miners marches through the street, protesting their working conditions. In this moment, we catch a glimpse of a looser approach to adaptation that the film could have taken, as the scene doesn’t occur in the book and yet condenses its themes—a naturalistic, pagan sexuality and working-class resistance—into a single, expressive image.

Later in the film, Clifford orders Mellors to examine his malfunctioning motorized wheelchair, assuming that his servant’s origins give him some innate understanding of motors. He then berates the groundskeeper for offering to instead push the wheelchair through the mud with Connie’s help, insisting on the power of the motor over the human body. Even in the book, it’s a cinematic scene that shows rather than states Clifford’s arrogance and faith in modernity, as well as the thematic tension between mechanization and labor. It’s a shame the filmmakers didn’t extrapolate similarly imagistic solutions from this scene.

The film’s most significant departure, both from the novel and period piece conventions, is in updating the sex scenes to emphasize Connie’s pleasure and agency. In most films, such scenes rely on a handful of standardized images to convey the idea of sex, more so than the act itself. Lady Chatterley’s Lover does, at least, show the developing sexual intimacy between Connie and Mellors across several encounters, and, rare for mainstream film, doesn’t shy away from pubic hair, genitalia, cunnilingus, kink, and so on. Even so, there’s something too straightforward about them. A more indirect, experimental approach might have done better justice to the novel’s lyrical evocation of transformative bodily consciousness.