The French Lieutenant's Woman
(1981)
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In this dramatic film, director Karel Reisz and screenwriter Harold Pinter adapt the complex romantic novel by John Fowles, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN. Set in 1867, Sarah Woodrough (Meryl Streep), a beautiful young woman, is condemned by society and driven into a deep melancholy because of her tragic affair with a French lieutenant. Fowles adds depth and texture to the story by including direct historical asides and scientific lessons by Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons), a wealthy amateur paleontologist and follower of Charles Darwin. In addition, there is a film within the film in which modern-day (1981) characters Anna (Streep) and Mike (Irons) provide comments on the characters they're portraying, and a little history, but primarily provide a parallel story as they enter an adulterous affair of their own. The contrast between the Victorian and the contemporary affairs, at first jarring, is beautifully staged and photographed. Streep's two performances, as the passionate Sarah, with her beautiful head of pre-Raphaelite hair and as the cool, modern Anna, never converge; the distinctness of the division between the two characters symbolises the almost unconscious perception that however distant a person feels from their repressed Victorian sexuality, it's still connected to them, as Darwin would say. |
Director Karel Reisz and screenwriter Harold Pinter here take on the near-impossible filming of John Fowles's complex novel. Two stories are told in parallel, one about an affair between a disgraced Victorian governess and an English gentleman, and the other about the relationship between the two film actors portraying the Victorian couple. Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep feature in the dual roles. The historic tale is often interrupted by the antics of the modern duo, which seem prosaic by comparison. However, Victorian morality seeps hauntingly into every frame of the main story, which is decked out in convincing period detail and hangs on two scorching performances from Irons and Streep. Reisz, meanwhile, focuses on the nature of passion by using a powerfully claustrophobic atmosphere.
Halliwell's Film Guide
Vaguely unsatisfactory and muddily coloured adaptation of a novel which set its thin story against the entire social background of the Victorian age as related to our own. The attempt to replace this by an equally thin modern story about actors playing th