(2007; French) Languidly paced (2 hours, 48 minutes) with photographic attention to features of the natural landscape as well as the flesh of the lead characters, director Pascale Ferran's sensual cinema, based on D.H. Lawrence's later, lesser-known version of his infamous novel, titled John Thomas and Lady Jane, won five César awards. Pared of the particulars of much of the peripheral events to the love affair, this rendering bares the story emotionally and physically, leaving out Lawrence's sexual/spiritual philosophizing as well as all the vulgarities of language, though the lady and her lover engage in frequent fornication.

Sitting apart from her husband, Sir Clifford (Hippolyte Giradot), and his male guests, one of whom she hears say that only those who believed they would die were killed in the war, Constance Chatterley (Marina Hands) at the end of a dinner party attends to her own thoughts as the men discuss the horrors they'd witnessed with touches of humor. She cares for her husband, bathing him and attending to his various personal needs, who had been paralyzed below the waist in the great conflict.

In need of communicating a message to his gamekeeper of wanting two pheasants for Sunday's dinner, Sir Clifford asks his wife to relay the request since the valet is ill. Looking as demur as a schoolgirl in her plaid skirt, brimmed velvet hat, and overcoat, Connie sets out on the errand; but when she espies Parkin (Jean-Louis Coullo'ch), burly with thinning hair, outside bathing himself (only his torso exposed), she runs off agitated by the sight, returning later to his cottage with Sir Clifford's bidding. In her bedroom she examines herself en l'ensemble in the mirror.

Disturbed by a nightmare, she soon becomes listless; after a doctor warns her of the serious consequences of not regaining her former vitality (a history of cancer in the family), her sister Hilda (Hèléne Fillières) threatens to take Connie back to London with her if Sir Clifford refuses to hire a nurse to become his personal attendant. From Tevershall, Mrs Bolton (Hèléne Alexandridis) arrives at Wragby Hall, allowing Connie to roam free, taking the nurse's suggestion to pick daffodils near the gamekeeper's hut.

Enjoying the scenery and the rustic comfort of the shelter, Connie inquires about a spare key. Sir Clifford cautions her about intruding on Parkin's turf, which though it belongs to her as the lady of the grounds, as an "uncouth fellow" the gamekeeper no doubt regards it as his "den or lair."

Attracted often to the hut, Connie's rejuvenation occurs with the renewal of spring; her sympathies to the pheasant hatchlings awaken something within her as well, trusting Parkin's gentle nature. She succumbs to his touch, surrendering her uterine hive to his ursine appetite. "I suppose it was bound to happen," he says.

A female narrator follows earlier textual transitions between scenes to inform us of Constance's "modest and attentive" conduct as a wife at Wragby. On the next day, Parkin in a subdued mood asks: "Do you think you lowered yourself?" Assuring him she has not, dismissing any pretext of her being "milady" or his being her servant, in her crimson outfit, she makes further reddition to Parkin's venereal poaching. "No need to talk," he says, ravishing her on a blanket on the floor of the hut again without kissing her.

Returning from a visit with Mrs Flint and her infant in the village of Marehay, she passes Parkin, who at first pays her little heed until she pursues him; in the woods against a tree, she goes down on him, kissing his lips, achieving mutual ecstasy. "We both came together this time," he says tenderly, though he's disturbed by her expression of gratitude to him.

At home Sir Clifford asks her about a rumor he'd heard from his friend Winter about her giving him an heir, leading to their discussion of her possibly having a baby. "Whose?" "My baby," she answers simply, reminding him of his once having said that "One body is as good as another."

Telling Parkin of her husband's implicit permission, she replies to his question of what if Sir Clifford knew of his involvement: "He would be furious." "Is that why you wanted me," Parkin challenges her, "to have a baby?" "I wanted you," she answers, though perhaps a child as well: "I liked your body." Accommodating himself to the circumstances of being the provider of the next heir to Chatterley, Parkin allows: "If he has the baby, we'll have had this."

Connie learns of Parkin's marriage, seeing a photo of him with his bride on his mantel, about which he's unwilling to speak, other than to say it wasn't love; Mrs Bolton (a neutral figure in this story) tells Connie of her husband's death in a mine explosion 17 years earlier when she was 24 and he 28, both very happily in love.

Riding his "foaming steed," a motorized chariot, Sir Clifford explains to his wife of socialist sympathies the need for there to be masters, including herself as boss to her servants, and his plan to ban further strikes by the miners, who lacking other means will be forced to work or starve. However, when his contraption's engine lacks the means to propel him up an incline, he's reduced to honking for Parkin - "I'm clearly at everyone's mercy" - to push him back to Wragby, where he makes a short apology for his earlier arrogant attitude. Behind Sir Clifford's back, Connie has agreed to an assignation that night with Parkin in his cottage.

As Connie prepares to depart with Hilda for a month's vacation with their father at Menton on the Riviera, Sir Clifford, suspicious of his wife's motives, lays down his conditions for a child: English of "decent stock."

Before taking leave of Wragby for France, she goes in the rain to the hut where she and Parkin giddily romp about in their birthday suits in the downpour and then back inside bedeck their naked bodies - a primitive marriage ritual of John Thomas and Lady Jane - with individual flowers, garlands, and leafy crowns. When Parkin mentions his Christian name Oliver and his hope of one day going to Canada, Connie offers her inheritance from her mother of four or five hundred pounds a year for him to buy a farm where she can come for visits, affording him times of privacy, "without worrying about marriage."

Disapproving of her misalliance with a man beneath her station but empathetic of her passion for Parkin, in her automobile Hilda (in search of another husband) drives her sister to London for the voyage south to Villa Natividad where they join their father and a childhood friend, Duncan Forbes, a Scottish painter. Letters from Mrs Bolton apprise Connie of Parkin's wife Bertha's returning to him after her being discarded by a miner with whom she'd been in concubinage, his suing for divorce, and subsequent serious injury at the hands of Bertha's brother.

Standing upright with a pair of crutches, Sir Clifford grandly greets her return; but she hastens to the hut, discovering Parkin turning over his duties to the new gamekeeper. Letting him be the first to know that she's pregnant and arguing against his going to Sheffield for employment, Connie extols his gentle heart (annulling his calling his sensitivity a weakness): "You have the gift of life." In reply, he confesses that she has enlarged his life, opening his prospects to an unimagined freedom: "You're like my home."

Each of the three film versions of Lawrence's once-controversial story has undeniable appeal, presenting contrasting aspects of interpretation, but here Marina Hands as Lady Chatterley and this conclusion are my favorites.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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