Oh my stars and garters, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (now on Netflix) has been adapted once again for the moving picture medium, and it might be the steamiest version yet – maybe on par with the raunchy 1981 version that aired on 1980s pay cable of so frequently during the wee Skinemax hours. Emma Corrin, who won a Golden Globe playing Princess Diana in The Crown, tackles the title role, which involves smushing up against Jack O’Connell (Godless) a fair amount, and also cavorting in the buff with him. D.H. Lawrence’s novel was famously banned for a while in the U.S. for its many naughty words and explicit sexual content, which distracts from its themes addressing taboos and class struggles; here’s hoping the latest movie version is more than just an excuse to see attractive actors without their clothes on.
LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Connie (Corrin) seems a touch more liberated than the stereotypical 1920s English woman. It’s her wedding day, and she talks openly with her sister Hilda (Faye Marsay) about her past relations with men. Not about relationships, but relations. Please note the difference. Her husband Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett) has been granted leave from the Great War to marry her, and he’s nervous in their new shared bed. He’s in his striped button-down pajamas. His mustache is just so. His hair is kempt. (He’s a dork!) His mind is elsewhere. He’s worried about getting killed when he’s sent back to battle. You’d think he might appreciate the distraction, but it’s a no go. Connie understands. But she sure seems… unsatiated.
It doesn’t get any better for either of them. Clifford returns from the war in a wheelchair. They pull up to his family manse, where he is the Lord and Connie is the new Lady. It’s a major task, just helping Clifford into his pants. That night in bed, it’s a no go, and it’ll never ever go. The poor chap. There’s some love there, though, and it’s not bad for a while. They hire staff to tend the grounds – there’s this modestly strapping guy who’ll just be the “gamekeeper,” MORE ON HIM LATER – and Connie functions as typist and editor as Clifford dictates his novel. Having been born into the Snooty-ass Class, there’s pressure on Clifford to produce an heir so the child can dictate orders to his lessers and push piles of dusty old money around. Gotta perpetuate this shit, it’s top priority. But – you know. It would take a miracle. And none of this sits well with Connie. She’d like to mother children for its own sake, and having an idle life and the whole of the second floor of a mansion all to herself because Clifford can’t go up the steps, well, it’s a lonely life.
So Connie finds herself taking long walks on the sprawling grounds as Clifford sinks deeper into bitterness and his prevailing sense of entitlement, which manifests via his abandoning his writing pursuits for investments in coal mining, which allow him to exploit the living shit out of the working class. First you feel for the guy, and then you don’t. Wotta creep. As for those long walks? One takes her out to a cozy cottage where our gameskeeper Oliver Mellors (O’Connell) lives out his postwar days quietly. Key to his setup is the outdoor shower, which allows Connie to take a peek or two – the first one accidental, the second one very much intentional. Can you blame her? Once that uncomfortable moment passes, they become friendly, but there’s clearly some electricity between their genitals, the type that demands that a plug be put in a socket, if you catch my drift. Oliver raises pheasants and she asks to handle one. “What if it pecks at me?” she says, and he replies, “Peck it back.” I’m melting over here. MELTING.
And so it begins, “it” being a deliciously salacious secret scrumpathon. Complicating all this is Clifford’s suggestion that Connie take a secret lover so she may give him an heir he can pass off as his own – notably, his dysfunctionality could easily be explained away with gossip among the servants implying that he isn’t completely broken, and lord knows the rumor mill around here grinds away incessantly like, well, you know, two things that grind a lot. Of course, he’d rather one of the servants not be Connie’s gent on the side, since he’s such a haughty cretin – which only makes the scene in which Clifford’s motorized three-wheeled chair can’t get going up an incline, requiring Oliver to stick his hand under the seat and fix things before giving him a big, hearty push, that much funnier. What a metaphor!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Lust, Caution, Atonement, Portrait of a Lady on Fire – basically any movie where people in period garb rip off said period garb in fits of exigent lust.
Performance Worth Watching: It’s hard to walk away from this Chatterley without believing Corrin is an emerging talent. Sure, it’s a brave performance in terms of pure physical exposure, but her emotional earnestness elevates this film above the base elements of erotic melodrama.
Memorable Dialogue: Connie and Oliver meet in the forest:
Oliver: You want a… coarser treatment with me?
Connie, raising an eyebrow: Mm hm.
Sex and Skin: Jeeves, FETCH ME MY FAINTING COUCH. Toplessness, bottomlessness, on-top-of-each-otherness, sometimes with realistic sound effects to counterbalance all the gauzy lighting, which makes all that skin look oh so lovingly dappled.
Our Take: Director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre lets us have our cake and eat it too, which is an unfortunate turn of phrase, but I can’t help myself. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is both potent in its eroticism and emotionally engaging. One can’t exist without the other – the film pays heed to the internal and external lives of its protagonist, and stokes our rooting interest in the emergence of the former to merge with the latter. Remember, you can’t tend the garden of the mind without eating the fruit of the body, or some tortured metaphor like that.Crucially, the film focuses tightly on Corrin’s charismatic and empathetic characterization of a liberal soul in a restrictive context; Connie’s happiness is at stake, and we remain invested in it throughout. Not that the screenplay goes too much deeper than that – its depiction of the upstairs/downstairs dynamic is underdeveloped, subject to a few boilerplate scenes, and it leaves the Clifford character psychologically one-dimensional. In that context, the sensual chemistry between O’Connell and Corrin is downright refreshing, their steamy encounters rendered with an eye-widening frankness we don’t see often in the increasingly timid age of modern cinema. Anyone searching for truly sexy romance these days surely feels Lady Chatterley’s pain, and may find some relief in the latest iteration of her story.
Our Call: Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a keen balance of steamy, playful and melodramatic. STREAM IT to watch British propriety crumble beneath the weight of the beast with two backs – and to watch Corrin’s star continue to rise.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.