Film Review: Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Director: Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
Starring: Emma Corin, Jack O’Connell
Running time: 127 minutes

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is obviously explicit, so to avoid awkwardness, please don’t watch it with your family. It’s a good film overall, though, remaining true to the spirit of D.H. Lawrence’s revolutionary text, the most famous novel of Nottingham’s arguably most famous author. 

As with the novel, the film follows the forbidden love affair of Lady Chatterley (played by Emma Corrin, of The Crown fame), and Oliver Mellors (played by Jack O’Connell, of Unbroken fame). Mellors is a gamekeeper on Chatterley’s husband’s grand estate in the Midlands. Lord Chatterley’s war injuries mean he can’t reproduce and so he urges his wife to secretly find a father to provide an heir for them. What he doesn’t expect, however, is that his loyal, albeit much more socially inferior, gamekeeper would provide this service. Mellors and Chatterley fall in love, and well, the rest isn't hard to imagine.

Lawrence’s text was originally published privately in 1928, but it was banned from being openly published until an infamous obscenity trial in 1960 granted Penguin Books the right to do so. Over 200,000 copies of the book were sold on the first day of its publication in November of that year. For those who might not know, it was banned for all those years because it contains very explicit descriptions of sexual activity between the lovers. It also features quite a few four-lettered swear words, which had up until then never been published in Britain. 

It's interesting that when I was watching the film, even though I read the book before and kind of knew what to expect, I was still shocked by the sex scenes between Chatterley and Mellors. What does this say about me, or perhaps about other people who felt the same way? That we’re still so shocked that the act of sex is exhibited to us in all its glory. 

The film reflects this air of scandal well. The passion of the romance between Mellors and Chatterley, conducted clandestinely despite all the barriers British post-war conventions threw at them, is constructed well in the film. You can feel the pressures faced particularly by Chatterley in Corrin’s sentimental performance. You can feel the passion through watching the sex scenes which, although they do sometimes go on too long and become a bit uncomfortable, nonetheless reflect what Lawrence intended. Lady Chatterley’s love is after all not a comfortable one, it transgresses all sorts of class and cultural boundaries a bourgeois lady wasn’t supposed to cross at the time. 

The scenery of the film is beautifully captured, to the credit of the director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre and her cinematographer Benoît Delhomme. There are a few scenes in which Corrin and O’Connell are walking around talking and enjoying each other’s company, where the scenery around them looks absolutely stunning, almost Eden-like. This, alongside with the palpable on-screen chemistry of the two lead characters, recreate Lawrence’s idea in the novel that sex and romance can be a unifying, almost religious experience. 

There have been quite a few adaptations of Lawrence’s novel before (including one in 1993 starring Sean Bean and Joely Richardson, and another in 2015 starring Richard Madden and Holliday Grainger). However this version, although it may run a bit too long, is well worth the watch because it provides a new scenic and passionate spin on the now widely-read classic. It’s also interesting to watch as a local to Nottingham not only because of our connection to Lawrence, but because of O’Connell’s use of East Midlands phrases in the film. 

Lady Chatterley's Lover is now available on Netflix