Lady Chatterley's Lover
What's in an Ending?
Welcome to the back half of our Valentine’s Day Two-Pack! Last week’s discussion of Dangerous Liaisons and Cruel Intentions can be read here.
Much ink has been spilled about Lady Chatterley’s Lover—its frank discussion of class, its use of “four-letter words” leading to its status as the premiere banned book of the 20th century, and the parallels between D.H. Lawrence’s physical status and Clifford Chatterley. All fascinating stuff and topics the good people at Wikipedia have summarized better and more succinctly than I ever could.
The book, first published privately in Florence, Italy in 1928, is the story of Constance Chatterley née Reid, re-discovering her independence and sexuality through an intense affair with Oliver Mellors, a gamekeeper employed by her husband, Clifford Chatterley.
Connie and Clifford, both members of the English upper-class, are married before Clifford returns to the front-lines of World War I. He is paralyzed in his service and returns to his ancestral home of Wragby. Supported by a fading coal mine, Lawrence describes the estate as old and depressing; Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre takes these cues and washes out any color in the sumptuous sets in her 2022 film adaptation. When his initial goals of being a respected writer fail, combined with his inability to produce an heir, Clifford becomes bitter and controlling of Connie. It is easy to look at Clifford through the lens of a villain. While he is definitely the antagonist of the story, it would be inaccurate—with the exception of one scene where he describes servants and workers as herd animals—to describe him as cruel. Yes, he acts on selfish impulses, but he is a sad, broken man. His capacity for evil is limited, making Clifford Chatterley a more nuanced and interesting character than if he were acting with pure malicious intent. Never forget the idea of Connie taking a lover is suggested by Clifford as a way to continue his family name.
Enough about Clifford, this story is not about him. To quote Mrs. Bolton in the film, “This is a love story.” And right she is! Rarely is there a movie so plain spoken about its moral without feeling heavy handed.
De Clermont-Tonnerre and screenwriter David Magree are faithful in their adaptation, leading to a wonderful film that builds on the best parts of Lawrence’s novel. Two iconic scenes, Mellors fixing Clifford’s wheelchair motor and Connie and Mellors dancing in the rain, get well-deserved recreations filled with heapsful of emotion—frustration and joy, respectively. De Clermont-Tonnerre takes full advantage of the medium, and you already know how much I love that.
I only caught fuck or its gerund a total of three times in the film, but its possible I miscounted. Don’t worry—there’s still plenty of sex which is filmed so tenderly that it feels inaccurate to describe it as graphic. Perhaps what modern pornography has been missing is thematic overtones of the decay and dissolution of the upper class. This includes the most striking image of the entire film: a shot where the camera is turned 90 degrees to capture Connie and Mellors, entwined, naked and decorating each other’s hair with wildflowers. It’s a painting out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that says more about the two lovers in five seconds than a writer of even Lawrence’s caliber can achieve in five pages.
Color, or lack thereof, is an incredibly important aspect on screen. Clifford is dressed in grays, while Mellors wraps himself in coarse, but lush blues verging on purple. Emma Corrin, who plays Connie, is often the only actor lit from the front instead of in silhouette. The light inside is cold and brutal, when Connie ventures outside, she soaks up the vibrant greens of the English countryside. Keep a close eye on Connie’s use of red, a “power color” which makes her stand out like a life raft against the drab scenery of Wragby. Only near the end does Connie don a purple and green outfit mimicking a vest frequently worn by Mellors.
The third act is where Magee diverges the most from the source material with the timeline of Connie traveling to Venice and the discovery of her affair with Mellors put in a blender. Budget or runtime could be the reason behind the change here, rather than any storytelling necessities. Honestly, it’s a miracle that this adaptation is a feature film instead of a mini-series with Netflix as the distributor. Regardless, the different endings frame the story in surprisingly differing ways.
Lawrence follows through on Mellors’s prediction that there are “dark days ahead”. The resolution for our heroes is unclear. Mellors, in both book and film, finds quiet work on a farm. The book ends with Mellors toiling away and it is never stated if Connie finds her way back to him. The next chapter, as it were, is left for the reader to decide.
The film gives us a more concrete answer, with one caveat. Lawrence takes care to mention several times Connie has a decent trust fund. Following her divorce from Clifford, she would not be living in squalor, but would be firmly middle class. The fallout for Connie is entirely social. There is no mention of the trust fund in the film. In fact, the aforementioned Mrs. Bolton tells everyone that she “will not hear a bad word about [Connie]. She gave up everything for him.”
The final emotions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover are almost flipped in the 1928 book and the 2022 movie. Where Lawrence is vague, de Clermont-Tonnere is specific; Connie and Mellors make it back to each other. Where Lawrence is hopeful for grander designs, de Clermont-Tonnere slams the door shut; Connie and Mellors are removed from society and must live on thirty shillings a week. But that’s the beauty of these characters—all they ever needed was each other.
Here’s a preview of our upcoming calendar, in case you’d like to read along—
March 10 - Frozen 2 and Inside Out 2 (streaming on Disney+)
March 17 - Paddington in Peru (Coming to theatres February 14)
March 24 - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Coming to theatres March 21)
March 31 - The Legend of Bagger Vance (streaming on Pluto TV)