Lady Chatterley’s Lover film review — Emma Corrin goes full boho glamazon

DH Lawrence’s last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), may not be his best, but it is by some distance his best known, most notorious and most frequently adapted. Something about all that earthy bonking in the brush between the upper-crust heroine and the gamekeeper Mellors continues to arouse readers, viewers and film-makers alike. It’s the frisson of forbidden desire across class barriers, perhaps, or maybe just the thrill of seeing all those drapey dresses and silky underthings being wantonly torn off in the heat of passion. In nearly every version, there’s a lot of fetishising of all the fabrics and finery encasing Lady C, making her final renunciation of it all the more thrilling.

This latest iteration, directed by French actor-turned director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, arguably assigns more agency to its heroine. She is played here with feral grace by Emma Corrin, who can really rock a summer frock trimmed in broderie Anglaise. She’s a little less of a victim of patriarchy, more a boho glamazon before her time, just needing a pair of Hunter boots to complete the festival look. Jack O’Connell’s Mellors is a less butch, more internalised version of the character compared to, say, Sean Bean’s super-stud in Ken Russell’s 1993 TV mini-series. (Charmingly, Joely Richardson, who played Connie Chatterley opposite Bean, is cast in this version as the lovers’ ally Mrs Bolton, like a widowed mother giving away the bride.)

Corrin and O’Connell have an interesting sexual chemistry, slightly wary of each other at first, then turning endearingly puppyish by the time they’re frolicking together naked in the rain. But their line readings are stiffer than usual for either actor, and poor Matthew Duckett really struggles to make a coherent character out of Connie’s paraplegic war veteran husband Sir Clifford, all wounded pride and hauteur.

However, the swoony cinematography by Benoît Delhomme, who has shot several high-fashion promo films as well as celebrated features such as The Theory of Everything, really elevates the work. It’s not common or garden literary soft porn; it’s literary porn with gauzy backlighting, lens flares, and interiors lit like paintings by Old Masters.

★★★☆☆

In UK and US cinemas from November 25 and on Netflix from December 2