The New Lady Chatterley: Sober, Sensual, French

The years have not been kind to Lady Chatterley. Nor for that matter have the movies. Scandalous in her day, the sexual adventuress of D. H. Lawrence's best-known novel has matured into something of a pop-culture joke, remembered less as a symbol of erotic liberation than a soft-core staple of late-night cable.

Notwithstanding an early, relatively staid 1955 French adaptation, starring Danielle Darrieux and made while the book was still contraband in the United States and Britain, film versions of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" have favored the heavy-breathing, bodice-busting approach to period romance.

The British provocateur Ken Russell, who had successfully tackled Lawrence with his film "Women in Love" in 1969, directed a sudsy "Chatterley" mini-series for the BBC in 1993. Trashier still was a 1981 version that featured Sylvia Kristel, the leggy star of the popular "Emmanuelle" films. There have been Japanese and Italian renditions; the '70s soft-core craze even produced a contemporary spinoff, "Young Lady Chatterley."

The newest "Chatterley" - a nearly three-hour French-language adaptation, directed by Pascale Ferran - effectively wipes the slate clean. "Lady Chatterley," which opens Friday, is both sober and sensual, not just a world away from the high-toned smut of its predecessors but also, in its directness and simplicity, an anomaly in the elaborately ornamented genre of the costume drama. In France it has won widespread critical acclaim and five C‚sar Awards.

Ms. Ferran's film is based not on the definitive "Lady Chatterley's Lover," which Lawrence published himself in Italy in 1928, but on an earlier version of the novel. He wrote it three times in two years, while suffering from the tuberculosis that killed him in 1930.

All three versions concern the intense affair between a frustrated young aristocrat and her virile gamekeeper, but the second "Chatterley," the one Ms. Ferran has adapted, is not as polemical as the third. The class differences between the lovers are more pronounced, but the lovers themselves are less inclined to subject their relationship to anguished analysis.

The signal quality of Ms. Ferran's "Lady Chatterley," as implied by its abbreviated title, is the sharpened focus on the heroine, Constance (played by Marina Hands). The first "Chatterley" film directed by a woman, it is also the only one that, in its contemplative way, honors Lawrence's radical ambitions.

His biographer John Worthen notes that Lawrence considered "Lady Chatterley's Lover" "a bit of a bomb" and described it in positively anarchic terms: "Let's hope it'll explode and let in some air."

Ms. Ferran argues for the continued relevance of Lawrence's stance. "The book is no longer scandalous today," she said in an interview in April, while in New York for the Tribeca Film Festival. "But its view of sexuality is still in the extreme minority. It's on the side of joy and the flourishing of the body. It considers sexuality without guilt, which is completely opposite to the puritanism of Lawrence's time and also to the neo-puritanism, so to speak, of our time."

"Lady Chatterley's Lover" occupies an awkward place in the history of modern sexual consciousness. The first legal publication of an unexpurgated edition in the United States in 1959, and in Britain the following year after a landmark obscenity trial, coincided with the dawn of the sexual revolution.

Philip Larkin's famous verse about sex beginning in 1963 - "Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles' first LP" - reinforces the connection. But changing attitudes led to the declining reputation of the book and its author.

"In the '60s Lawrence was all the rage," said Sarah Cole, who teaches English at Columbia University and specializes in 20th-century British literature. "By the end of the '70s that status had begun to change, thanks mostly to feminist reappraisals of his work.

'Lady Chatterley's Lover' was once viewed as a revolutionary story of sexual liberation but came to be seen as a troubling story of female subservience." Ms. Ferran discovered Lawrence via an essay by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. She made her way through the major novels while preparing another film a few years ago.

Shortly after that project foundered she came upon the second version of "Chatterley" and, she said, "fell in love instantly." Published in French as "Lady Chatterley and the Man in the Woods" and in English as "John Thomas and Lady Jane" (the lovers' pet names for their genitals), that version had, she thought, aged better than the third.

The attraction to Lawrence is in keeping with Ms. Ferran's generation of filmmakers. She is part of a loose collective - Arnaud Desplechin ("Kings and Queen") is the best known - who attended Idhec (Institute des Hautes tudes Cin‚matographiques) film school in Paris and have occasionally worked together.

"It's a very particular generation," said Emmanuel Burdeau, editor in chief of the influential journal Cahiers du Cin‚ma, which ranked "Lady Chatterley" as its No. 4 film of 2006.

"They share an admiration for Anglo-American literature and an intellectual approach to cinema combined with the belief that it is possible to gain success without making any concessions. Fran‡ois Truffaut remains the model: an artist who was able to attract an audience."

New York Times