A new adaptation of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” emphasises the love

AS HE WAS dying in 1929, D.H. Lawrence defended “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” as “an honest, healthy book, necessary for us today”. Over the next few decades, censors, critics and lawyers would scrap over the wholesomeness and necessity of his final novel. Lawrence, the tubercular, self-exiled son of a Nottinghamshire miner, even managed to tweak the course of British social history from beyond the grave when, in 1960, a landmark trial cleared Penguin’s unexpurgated paperback edition of obscenity. Lawrence had eminent champions in court, but the case against him was probably doomed the minute the prosecuting counsel asked, to universal derision: “Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”

By then, many wives and servants had read Lawrence’s molten mix of cross-class love affair and thunderous sermon against the “mechanised greed” of industrial modernity. In some jurisdictions, they could also watch dramatisations of the torrid trysts between Mellors, the philosophical gamekeeper, and Connie Chatterley, the thwarted, yearning landowner’s wife. A series of screen adaptations began with Marc Allégret’s French film version in 1955, which itself survived a lawsuit in New York.

True to sultry stereotype, French film-makers have led the way in bringing the passion of Connie and Oliver (Mellors) to the screen. In 1981 Just Jaeckin—director of a soft-porn “classic”, “Emmanuelle”—turned his hand to the tale, but the feast of flesh wilted at the box office. In 2006 Pascale Ferran based her well-received film on the second of Lawrence’s three manuscripts, entitled “John Thomas and Lady Jane”. Meanwhile more ambitious British efforts from Ken Russell (a four-part BBC series in 1993) and Jed Mercurio (another BBC film in 2015) boasted top-class acting but struggled to keep the social critique and carnal ecstasy in equilibrium. Then again, arguably so did Lawrence.

Made for Netflix, the latest version of Lawrence’s ardent, if preachy, plea for the human “touch of tenderness” against the iron fist of money and machines comes from Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, an actor-director. She supplies a respectful, gimmick-free interpretation and dodges the worst traps for the “Chatterley” adapter: overwrought couplings and ponderous didacticism. Her stress falls on the pair’s love story: the “little flame between us” that scandal never quite puts out. Lawrence’s beloved Midlands countryside glows in an eerie pale light. The hellish mines that encircle this idyll threaten the lovers’ bid for liberty. For Lawrence, the carnage of the first world war had capped the entire “black mistake” of the industrial era. The “cataclysm” of the trenches left survivors hungry for redemption in body and spirit.

The lovers shoulder a heavy burden of ideas. Creditably, they refuse to sink under the weight. Jack O’Connell’s brooding, ironic Mellors claims his due as a sensitive thinker and reader, not just a rustic stud. Emma Corrin—formerly seen as Princess Diana in “The Crown”—has poise and pluck alongside the vulnerability of a caged wild thing. Ms Clermont-Tonnerre merges the erotic encounters into a more general mood of lyric, pantheistic rapture. The abbreviated denunciations of war, capitalism and pollution (“what has man done to man?”) seldom slow the pace, even if a sometimes humdrum screenplay fails to channel much of Lawrence’s prophetic fire. Although reasonably explicit, this version never feels sensationalist.

In the 1970s feminist polemics, notably from Kate Millet and Germaine Greer, indicted Lawrence for phallus-worshipping misogyny. More recently, other women authors—and now directors—have rescued his reputation. Doris Lessing insisted that “no one ever wrote better about the power struggles of sex and love.” In the past year alone, Alison MacLeod’s novel “Tenderness” has sympathetically revisited the writing of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and the battles fought by its advocates, and Lara Feigel’s study “Look! We Have Come Through!” enlists Lawrence as a spirit-guide to survival during the pandemic.

For Ms Feigel, Connie is no patriarchal cipher but “one of the great portrayals by a man of a female character”. Ms Feigel sees how Connie—dancing naked in the rain, or blissfully wreathed in flowers—acts as a nymph-like spirit of returning spring. In both this reading and the film, she becomes a symbol of resistance to environmental wreckage on a poisoned earth “made foul by men”. Once a byword for blue, Lady Chatterley now wears a modern shade of green. ■

“Lady Chatterley’s Lover” is playing in some cinemas now, and streaming on Netflix from December 2nd