Lady Chatterley’s Lover is based on the novel by D H Lawrence. His last novel. It’s a Victorian period piece set in the early 1900s. It already had another iteration back in 2015 on television on BBC1 starring Richard Madden, Holiday Grainger, and Jodie Comer. This new version is set to come out on Netflix over the Thanksgiving weekend here in the United States and the UK. It’s a love story for the ages many women love.
Lady Chatterley (Emma Corrin, The Crown) is the wife of an aristocrat Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett). When he comes back from war with a debilitating injury she starts to become disenchanted with him. She starts to notice a groundskeeper named Oliver Meliors (Jack O’Connell,71) on her husband’s palatial estate.
This story is a classic romance that goes back decades. The struggle of men and women trying to find love is an age-old story. Even men and women who are married who fall out of love is an age-old story. It’s hard to be in love and keep that flame lit for a long time. This particular story has an underlying subplot that makes falling in and out of love harder for the title character Lady Chatterley.
This film directed by Laure De Clermont Tonniere has a unique vision that will get audiences drooling for all the explicit sex scenes. Cotton and O’Connell bare it all for the world to see, many times. The story just shows women were bored back in the day and with a husband debilitated by injury what was she supposed to do? It makes sense she went seeking other companionship from a strapping young man who could satisfy her.
The cast is very good in this film with an R rating. They do the dialogue written almost one hundred years ago quite a bit of justice. The actor could have gotten lost in all the sex scenes but they were constant professionals and deliver their lines with precision and pride. This kind of English literature surely wasn’t easy to remember but it was well worth seeing these professional actors utter it all brilliantly. Especially Corin and O’Connell.
The technical aspects of the film were done very well as well. The cinematography captured the dank and foggy wetlands of England. The picture could have gotten lost in all the rain and fog but it didn’t. They found some beautiful weather to film some of the time. So it doesn’t all look cold and wet and damp. It has some nice sunny scenes as well.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a bit scandalous of a film but it’s mostly done very tastefully and professionally by the director Clermont Tonniere. The actors deliver their lines with precision and handle the sex scenes like seasoned pros. The look of the movie could have been bogged down by all the weather England is known for but it looks very well most of the time. This film could have been a salacious journey into pornography but it’s not. It is a very intimate look at a lonely lady who finds love outside her husband’s arms. It’s a classic Victorian love story. Women will definitely check it out on Netflix for sure.
4 stars
Dan Skip Allen
From the Fourth Row! 