KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * * *
D.H. Lawrence wrote three versions of the story that became his most famous, once-scandalous novel. This is based on the second, John Thomas and Lady Jane, and you don't have to have read any version to know that those names refer to body parts.
This is the sixth screen adaptation of the celebrated story of a frustrated upper-class woman whose earthy affair with a gamekeeper has a transformative effect on her sexuality and her sense of self. It's also the first directed by a woman.
It takes surprisingly little time to get used to the fact that French actors, in France, speaking French, are telling a story so saturated with notions of English class and so intimately associated with Lawrence's "smoky Midlands".
It underlines how French the story is, after all; it's hard to imagine the book's publishers facing obscenity charges in Paris in 1960, or any other year.
In any case, the world in which Ferran's Constance Chatterley moves is full of dappled sunlight and flowery glades. There is a brief, meaningful sequence in which she watches miners emerging from the pits her husband owns, but this is a more sensuous than raunchy take on the story: the sexiness is unblinking but the sex is coy, full of fades to black and post-coital dozing.
The film's extremely leisurely pace may frustrate some: the action doesn't even begin to get hot and bothered for about 45 minutes.
Lawrence aficionados will doubtless find it wanting but it remains very true to the spirit of the final book.
Hands does a very fine job of registering Constance's often volcanic shifts of emotion with subtle changes of expression but Coulloc'h's saturnine gamekeeper Parkin (renamed Mellors for the third version of the novel) is too surly to be persuasive.
Near the end he claims that his overtly feminine nature has always been a handicap, but to me he seemed about as feminine as Colin Meads.
Cast: Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Coulloc'h, Hippolyte Girardot
Director: Pascale Ferran
Running time: 168 mins
Rating: M (nudity and sex scenes)
Screening: Rialto
Verdict: More sensuous than raunchy, but a remarkably engrossing adaptation of an early version of the famous Lawrence novel.
