Mark Reviews Movies: LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER (2022)

Lady Chatterley's Lover, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 1, 2022

"This is a love story," says a character near the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover, director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre's adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's—to put it mildly—controversial novel. One might be thinking that of course it is, but what kind of love story is it?

Is it an explicitly sexual one about the torrid affair between a woman who married into the upper class and a servant on the estate? Obviously, it is. Is it one that attempts to observe that there's more to love than either the exclusive realm of the mind or the specific landscape of the body? Yes, it's that, too.

Is it a tragic one about how societal matters of class and expectation can get in the way of what seems to be a perfect union? Well, that's certainly a point, but it's not one that's going to get in de Clermont-Tonnerre and screenwriter David Magee's way. This is a love story, yes, and the filmmakers want to ensure that it is, above all else, a romantic one in the broadest possible sense of that word.

A couple changes to Lawrence's story are necessary, then, but by the time the most significant one arrives, there's very little reason to care about a thing like faithfulness to the source material. This film is sexy and smart and, in the way the story is about unlikely partners finding a deep connection that's rooted in physicality and intellect and mutual respect, romantic. Those qualities are both the least and the best we can hope for when dealing with a romance, so if anything, the film succeeds in that regard. It's enough.

Any summary of the story seems useless—not necessarily because Lawrence's novel has become the stuff of required reading (Its history of banning and legal cases meant the book went censored or completely unpublished in certain countries for a few decades after the author's death), but because the foundation of the material has more or less become a cliché. After all, how many mass-market romance novels have a plot similar to this one?

Standards of reviewing still apply, though, so the tale revolves around Connie (Emma Corrin), who marries Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett) for love and into the title of "Lady" just before he ships off the front of the Great War. Six months later, the war is finished, and a wounded Clifford is paralyzed from the waist down. The couple moves from London to his family's country estate, in need of some attention and a team of servants to accomplish it. There's a joke about the rest of the plot in there somewhere, because Connie becomes fascinated by and, later, infatuated with Oliver Mellors (Jack O'Connell), the estate's gamekeeper.

Those are the broad strokes of the story, which eventually observes the lady and the servant in various states of undress while having enthusiastic sex in assorted locales. There's something amusing and a bit bleak about the state of modern movies and their hesitancy toward sex in how surprising this film's frank depiction of the act feels. We don't get much of scenes such as the ones here anymore in relatively mainstream fare. One imagines the filmmakers can only get away with it here because of the perceived prestige of the source material, and there are layers of irony to that when one considers the novel's history of generating controversy over frank depictions of sex.

Anyway, there is more to the story than the sex, although a good amount of it is present—and, at times, quite alluring—here. As one might anticipate, the affair comes about because of some marital troubles between Connie and Clifford, but those issues possess some depth of both character and theme to accompany them. The main problem isn't that Clifford can't—because of his injury—or won't—because of his prudishly traditional ways—find some way have a physical connection with his wife. It's that he takes her wants and needs for granted. Even beyond that, though, he takes for granted his wife's affection for him, suggesting that Connie should bed another man—of some social status, obviously—so that Clifford can have an heir in name at least. She doesn't want that—until she meets and gets to know Oliver, of course, who definitely doesn't fit Clifford's standards for a sire of his heir.

The central point of Magee's screenplay is the love story between Connie and Oliver, who hide their affair but become more comfortable as their feelings for each other grow beyond sex—almost as if, on some level, at least one of them wants to be caught. Beneath it, though, is a study, as well as an intrinsic critique, of upper-class sentiments of power and superiority through Clifford.

He's not a bad husband or man because of his physical limitations or his insecurities over them (There are moments of genuine sympathy for him, even just after he becomes the main obstacle for the romance). He is both of those things, though, because of how he comes to perceive people, including his wife, as means to his selfish ends (A minor subplot about local a mine and his growing involvement in it operation expands the scope of his greed).

Clifford wants control, and Connie and Oliver's affair comes to represent a sense of freedom beyond that influence of individual people and society in general (The two cavort naked in the rain at one point, after all). Lady Chatterley's Lover gets at this notion in its sensual and thoughtful ways, and the end point of this adaptation, while different from the novel, seizes control in a definitively romantic way.

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