Pascale Ferran's "Lady Chatterley" arouses the intentions of an intellectual mind rather than the consummate capitulations to the cataract of passion, and other sensual stimuli. Arriving with a brag sheet that includes five 2007 Cesar Awards, including ones for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Photography, the Ferran's overreaching adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's "John Thomas And Lady Jane", clearly has pedigree and an elegantly realised French sensibility. But there has to be something said for its lack of transgressions, an unwelcoming throwback to the days of muddled visions of carnal congress that was better served by the imagination in bodice-ripping erotic literature. Even by the nature of its anti-revisionist material and its ideas of sexual awakening as a process that by extension has to entail bridled fervour, the film's divisions are so neatly devised that there's nothing left for us to react to in its hollow exercise in ardent romanticism.
Review of Lady Chatterley
