Lady Chatterley's Lover movie review (2022)
To say it another way, Lady Chatterley's Lover is not just a sexy love story. Yes, there is steamy infidelity but the real point (which was lost in the ensuing decades-long scandal surrounding the book) is integrating body and mind as a way of reconnecting to our purest impulses, and in so doing, maybe healing the whole world. Lawrence wore his Thomas-Hardy-Walt-Whitman influences on his sleeve. Of course, at the end of the day, the reason the book scandalized generations was because of all that throbbing pulsing sex, all those rising organs and enigmatic fluids, the Edenic orgasms, plus a couple of f-bombs (used as verbs, not adjectives, a crucial distinction).
Lawrence's book has been adapted for screens big and small many times, to varying degrees of success. The plot is well known and isn't all that original (a rich woman hooks up with her manly gardener), and there are landmines everywhere in the material. If an adaptation just focuses on the hot sex, then you're missing what Lawrence was getting at the "cataclysm" of war, the dangers of industrialization, the growing class conflict, and the myriad ways humanity has suffered spiritually from prioritizing mind over body. This new adaptation, directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, avoids the landmines remarkably well. The film shimmers and breathes, leaving space for discovery.
Connie Reid (Emma Corrin) has a couple of love affairs under her belt when she marries Baronet Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett), right before he heads off to fight in the Great War. Connie was raised in a modest slightly bohemian family, so becoming "Lady Chatterley" is a huge change. She is removed from London, from her sister Hilda (Faye Marsay), to live in the massive Chatterley estate. When Clifford returns home from the war, he is paralyzed from the waist down and needs full-time care. Connie loves him and does her best. However, she's a young woman with an impotent husband who shows no interest in getting creative about sexual pleasure. He wants an heir though, so he suggests she take on a lover, not for pleasure, of course, but for impregnation. Connie is devastated. She's aching for affection and touch. Then she gets a glimpse of Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper (Jack O'Connell). And with barely half a dozen words spoken between them, they hook up. He is not the aggressor or initiator. She is. He is more conscious of the class difference than she is. He calls her "m'lady" in a tone of deep respect and has a hard time dropping it after they've been intimate. Class awareness is engrained in him.
