Lady Chatterley’s Lover Is a Sweet Love Story, But Deserves More Scandalous Sex
In 1960, Penguin Books was put on trial for its publication of D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The prosecution accused the book of obscenity, referring, in particular, to its numerous, exhaustively descriptive sex scenes. It’s a piece of literary history that many are at least partially aware of. But while people tend to focus on the scandalous words on the page, one of the most important elements of Chatterley’s past is that Penguin was found not guilty because, in large part, the courts deemed the novel’s sex scenes as entirely necessary. Chatterley’s is not a book about sex. Instead, it uses sex as a method to describe a deeply powerful love. When the novel’s protagonist, Connie, describes sleeping with her lover as a “poignant, marvelous death,” for example, this “death” of course does not refer to the act of intercourse itself. No, it is Connie’s love for gamekeeper Oliver Mellors that makes sex feel like an act that holds life and death in the palm of its hand.
Given this, there is naturally a great deal of pressure that comes with adapting Chatterley’s. After all, how can one do justice to sex scenes that literally got the law involved? But French director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre was willing to take on the challenge, adapting the controversial novel for Netflix with a screenplay from Finding Neverland writer David Magee. Lady Chatterley’s Lover follows Connie Reed (Emma Corrin), a young newlywed whose baronet husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett), recently sustained wartime injuries that left him medically impotent. Still hoping for an heir, Clifford encourages Connie to have an extramarital affair without catching feelings. But it turns out that that last clause is a bit of a tough ask when your gamekeeper is the ruggedly handsome, coolly disaffected Oliver Mellors (Jack O’Connell).
As in Lawrence’s novel, Connie and Oliver’s love affair is the beating heart of Clermont-Tonnerre’s film. For its first quarter, the two engage in a delightful, agonizing will-they-won’t-they dance, with Connie’s marital loneliness and craving for partnership drawing her desperately to Oliver, and Oliver’s nonchalance compelling any sane viewer to will Connie to win him over even more. When Connie and Oliver finally consummate their relationship on the floor of the gamekeeper’s hut, it’s hard to not want to let out a little cheer.
The film’s first sex scene admittedly plays as clumsy and awkward, with Oliver not quite knowing where to look and Connie not quite knowing how to react. And at first, this direction is a wise decision. The pair’s mismatched body language is fitting with their situation: Oliver is sleeping with his boss’s wife and Connie is having an affair, particularly naughty things to do in the 1920s.
The problem is the two never quite sync up. Even in what is perhaps the most erotic, romantic scene of the whole film, they hardly meet one another’s eyes, and their movements don’t match. How, then, are we supposed to believe that this is a love worth abandoning all for?