Lady Chatterley
Director: Pascale Ferran
Year Released: 2006
Rating: 2.5
The upper-class wife of an injured (read: impotent) WWI veteran really needs to get laid (oh, and some emotional comfort as well), so she chases after the virile gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coullo'ch). The class and sexual issues are all D.H. Lawrence, but the remarkably languid pacing is exclusively Ferran's - this is the kind of film that could have very well run for hours and hours if she'd let it (or been allowed - the TV version is approximately 220 minutes), playing out like a Merchant-Ivory production directed by Terrence Malick. There are more shots of leaves and streams and wildlife than anything not on the Nature Channel, and there isn't much tension because there's never any real risk of the two lovers getting caught, but there is chemistry between Coullo'ch and lead Marina Hands, and it's uplifting seeing them roll around in the mud and dance in the rain. Sensuous is a good word to describe this; protracted is certainly another.
