The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981)

Simply Perfect

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is one of those movies where you suspect that someone is trying to make a profound point, but you feel like a dummy because you just cannot figure out what it is. The best I could come up with is that love is just as nerve-wracking today as it was in the nineteenth century, only today men don't have to worry about being sued for breach of promise, and women don't have to worry about being ruined for life. So I guess we can call that progress. There is a ludicrous scene in which Irons finally gets to have sex with Streep (in the nineteenth century), and he spends more time taking off his clothes than he does having sex with her. So that is another difference: in the nineteenth century, people wore more clothes and had less foreplay.

If you like Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and novelists of that ilk, you ought to get a bang out of this story of Jeremy Irons sacrificing his self esteem for love of a woman whom he loses for the flimsiest of reasons.The story in the main has Irons and Meryl Streep back in Victorian England. She is "the French lieutenant's woman" and is shunned by the village for having had an affair with the married man. She now moons over her absent lover and waits for the return that will never be realized.Irons is an independently wealthy naturalist who visits the village in search of fossils and finds love for the darkly mysterious Streep, although Irons himself has just married into a family of some repute. He divorces his wife -- shocking! -- and gives up his status as an "honorable gentleman." He gives Streep money, and later follows her to London, loses her, finds her three years later, and she rejects him because she has now become a liberated woman.There is a parallel story that doesn't get much time. It takes place today. Irons and Streep, both married, are having a fling during the shooting of a film. Again, Irons falls in love, but for Streep the encounter was far more casual and despite his efforts, she takes off happily with her French husband.The only Fowles novel I've read is "The Magus", which follows a similar trajectory -- man is coerced into a woman's thrall and is then deliberately and openly betrayed by her. The traditional Madia Gond, a tribe in India, had a custom called the ghotul in which adolescent boys and girls lived in the same house and played musical beds each night, whether they wanted to or not. The elders of the tribe claimed that this practice was intended to "cure them of love." I begin to wonder if Fowles isn't on the same trip. You know, "Most friendship is feigning; most loving mere folly"? Jeremy Irons as the uptight Victorian naturalist manqué never steps wrong. He ALWAYS never steps wrong. Meryl Streep. If you've seen her in later character roles like "The Iron Lady", you may not remember how lovely, pale, and fragile she could be in her earlier films. She's a splendid actress, even though make up has given her a mop of dark reddish hair so massive that it may have its own time zones. And both of the actors are perfectly capable of overcoming the sometimes stilted dialog: "I have taken unpardonable advantage of your condition. Forgive me." There are some allusions to Darwin but I don't think they amount to very much.It was directed by Karel Reisz. He directed the colossal art house flop called "Weeds," which was saved from complete obscurity only by my own stellar performance as an extra. Boy, did I establish atmosphere, or what? A prisoner smoking with a cigarette holder, a masterful touch! Here, whatever else we may say about the film, Reisz and his photographer, Freddie Francis, have paid such close attention to composition, values, rich colors, and camera placement that every shot is almost a painting in itself.I'm compelled to recommend it, although I wish the endings had been different and at least ONE of the Ironses finally wound up with one of the Streeps, but no dice. It's a story of lost loves, along the lines of "Wuthering Heights", but I wasn't bored for a moment.

I am going to the top end of a 5 here. This film had a big reputation when it was 1981 but almost all the quality here is Meryl Steep in her first role, and first Academy Award.Some great sites were used and the filmography has an experts look to the eye. It has a great score. The problems- it is too long and the story turns into a mush mash of themes once you get past the early reels.There is not enough romance scenes with Meryl Streep either and at an age where any guy would climb all over this one unless he was spade or neutered. For Streep, she earns 4 out of the 5 rating out of 10 I give it.

Spoilers! The film is very disappointing. The lack of chemistry between the two stars, the insertion of the modern story with the lack of chemistry between the players within the modern story, the overacting by all the actors (or is it poor directing?) the length of the film, the assumption that we would believe Sarah a virgin when Charles finds her at the hotel, that we would believe Jeremy's character would be so gullible and go against very inflexible norms of Victorian behavior, the fact that the heroine should have been an English actress, the attempt to too literally adapt the novel to film, and then the overlay of Darwin, Freud, and the Pre-Raphealite Brotherhood just made a totally unengaging, wearing film.