Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Lady Chatterley’s Lover has, in the almost 100 years since it was initially unveiled to the world in a storm of controversy and censorship by DH Lawrence, morphed from a shockingly frank appraisal of sex and the British class system into a rather nice story which offers the bare minimum of what you’d expect of an erotic romance in terms of explicitness and rebuffals of class rigidity. This is, of course, a churlish assessment of Lawrence’s grip on these themes, but it is one that the latest adaptation of his most infamous work does little to dispel.

In the confined framework of a Netflix period romance, however, this is no bad thing in itself. Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s latest take on the oft-adapted novel is a more than serviceable screen romance of swooning capability for fans of the genre, upheld almost solely by the agitated, shackled presence of Emma Corrin’s Connie and the animistically magnetic Jack O’Connell as Oliver Mellors, and the chemistry that crackles and sparkles into a fully realised glow by the film’s conclusion.

The sex scenes, by which every adaptation of Chatterley is assessed, for better or worse, do feel oddly underwhelming and safe by modern standards, and hold no torch to the rawness, nuance and intensity exhibited in Emily Atef’s More Than Ever. The film is also coated in an icy blue hue which, while a visually intriguing choice, doesn’t seem to meet an end in terms of thematic or narrative purpose. Similarly to this year’s Where The Crawdads Sing, it feels like a film that wants to be about the roughness and mire of physicality and nature without truly getting its hands dirty by plunging them into the earth.

Still, Corrin and O’Connell remain as watchable as ever, and the final cadence of the film’s closing curtain is satisfying and genuine.

Matthew McMillan

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is released in selected cinemas on 25^th November and is available on Netflix on 2^nd December 2022.

Watch the trailer for Lady Chatterley’s Lover here: