BY: JERRY P

Winner of 5 César Awards, Pascale Ferran's adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's sensuous classic is easily the most fresh and beautiful, focusing on the core of the story: the love affair between two people.

D.H.Lawrence wrote "Lady Chatterley's Lover" three times. The third version is the one that was so controversial and was taken to court as obscene, but passed the bar of acceptance. It was published in 1930, the year Lawrence died.

The middle version, called "John Thomas and Mary Jane," wasn’t published in the United States until 1972. It is the novel that Ms. Pascale Ferran used in shaping “Lady Chatterley.” The film was released in 2006 and has been universally praised. In the author-approved third version Constance Chatterley engaged in rather explicit sex, including sodomy, erotic material that Lawrence wanted to fling in the face of English prudes and puritans. Connie in the middle book is less sophisticated but more sex-ready, and knows what she wants and what she needs. Marina Hands plays Connie with a blend of innocence and lust, with passion and curiosity, and her performance garnered a Caesar, an award equal to an Academy Award in this country. Actually, the film got 5 Caesars, one also for Best Picture.

Given the circumstances at Wragby, the Chatterley estate, the affair she has with the Gamekeeper was bound to happen. For those of you who don’t know the basic story of Lady C let me tell you. Connie is trapped within a sexless, loveless marriage due to the fact her husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, a coal Magnet in the English Midlands, was severely injured in the first World War, and as a consequence he is not only an invalid, but impotent as well. At age 27 Connie is unhappy, bored, and - she doesn’t know it yet - horny. When she meets the gamekeeper, Oliver Parkins (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h), things begin to stir in her and eventually sparks begin to fly. Sex with Parkins - there are six sex scenes in the movie, which are both passionate and matter of fact - turns out to a transformative experience for both of them and from that they make choices about their futures.

Lady C has been made into a movie six times, as its theme has unending appeal in the West. The first one was released in 1959, another in 1980, and then in 1993, Ken Russell, the aging genius of a previous era, did a version for BBC Television. Two films were earlier made off the British Isles, one in Germany, the other in Italy, and now we have this new version, in French but shot in England.

The new interpretation, called “Lady Chatterley,” is the best of the lot. I saw Ken Russell’s version several months ago, which is a four-part six hour long made-for-TV-movie; it was also an extravagant melodrama, grand and foolish at the same time, with Joley Richardson as Connie and Sean Bean as Mellors, the name of the Gamekeeper in the third version. I thought action star Bean was terribly miscast. He made Mellors a brooding brute with hardly an ounce of real and effective sensitivity - very unconvincing for a figure largely seen as a male icon of virility. The original title of the novel was "Tenderness" and Bean’s acting ran counter to that sort of feeling. The actor who played Parkin does fit the bill. He was a physical type that seemed quite appropriate for the role, and played Parkin shy, quiet, assertive but not pushing, and very considerate of the female. He talks very little, only when he must.

In fact, I loved the silences in this interpretation: Space was made for the non-human and the non-verbal. We hear the wind through the trees and see Connie constantly wandering through the woods. We are aware of flowers, birds, creeks, and the greenness of England. Lawrence would approve this approach for the panorama of Nature was always included in his novels, poetry and short stories. In his first novel, "The White Peacock," he mentioned scores of flowers by name. He had a keen sensibility and was highly receptive to the splendors of Nature. Parkin wins over Lady C precisely because of his sensitivity and substance as a man; and Jean-Louis does a super job of creating a fitting resemblance for a non-aristocratic, hero male connecting to a warm, receptive female who has been roused to life by sleeping with him. He is the perfect embodiment of the Lawrencian archetype of what a man should be. He was earthbound, self-contained and self-sufficient, rustic but aware of the Modern world and its demands, and, of course, a sensitive lover open to the radiance and resonance of Nature.

But when all is said and done the movie belongs to Marina Hands, the 27-year-old actress who plays Constance Chatterley. She was truly impressive in a demanding role, no doubt guided by Ms. Ferran the Director, who had her practiced those love scenes before they even attempted to shoot them.

Pascales’ interpretation was so appealing because it was fresh and liberating, and because she wrung out of the story the emphasis on the class warfare, all of Lawrence’s carrying on about a dread and weary world, the evils of industrialization, and his gospel of Phallic Narcissism. Instead she reduced it down to the real meat of the story, the love story, about two people crossing - transcending - class barriers to enjoy a relationship rooted, not so much in institutional sanctions, but in Nature, the animal soul, and carnal connectedness. Instead of identifying with technology, politics, religion, war, and the virtues of white industrial civilization, they took to the higher ground of wholeness and unity – of following their own bliss. Clifford’s physical incapacities and elevation of mind over body was for Lawrence the problem of Western Civilization, and he never tired of railing against it and spelling out his alternative way, a gospel of revitalization of the senses through sex, love, and instinct. Being reborn to sex his ideal couple represented a way out of the matrix of malaise and illusion. Connie and Parkins represent the honestly striving couple. Coming from vastly different worlds, they tested the waters of erotic engagement and were able to swim to safe haven together. The abrupt ending of the film is similar to how the book ends. The last word in the novel was “yes.” And that YES was indeed an affirmation of sex and love, of two people who had fought through all the obstacles of fragmentation, isolation, and class, to discover “Ripeness is all.”