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Lady Chatterley

Marina Hands

O the stale old dogs who pretend to guard

the morals of the masses,

how smelly they make the great back-yard

wetting after everyone that passes.

- D.H. Lawrence, The Young and Their Moral Guardians

When I was about five, my family stopped taking vacations.  Maybe, it was that one of my brothers tried to hang another from the hotel clothes rack, thus snapping the rod off the wall.  Maybe, it was another brother pushing all the buttons of the hotel elevator, breaking it in the process, and then stepping out at the last second, leaving another sibling trapped within.  Maybe, it was my almost drowning in the swimming pool. I decided the best way to learn how to swim, was just to jump in the deep end. It could have been when one of my brothers decided, at the top of the hill of a rollercoaster, that the ride was not for him and he was getting out, there and then. Possibly, it was our underweight babysitter taking a nose dive, at the zoo.  I know that my getting sick at the beginning of a play, where the ushers locked the doors, and my dad had to sit through the entire play with my by-product cradled in his hands, like a bowl of soup. Later, he carried me out of another play, in an outdoor theater because I was not doing so well, and we ran into a not so friendly skunk. In my 20s, my parents started taking vacations again.  This time, strangely, they did not invite us kids to go with them.  They became world travelers. I looked forward to hearing about their latest adventure in Italy.  It should be noted, that my mom is very prim and proper.  So, it was a surprise to me when I asked her what Italy was like. She said a word that I never expected to have come out of her mouth.  It seemed everywhere they went, you could count on seeing two things.  The first was Jesus. Statues, paintings, and shrines everywhere; turn around and there is Jesus looking at you. The second thing that always seemed to be poking out at them was, well, I will not use the adult, medical word that my mother used; let’s just say the daddy part.  In America, you rarely see it. In Italy, you cannot get away from it. In Italy, if it started to rain, instead of drops of water, one could almost expect what I just mentioned to rain down on your head.  It seemed like in every building, down every street, there was Jesus, or it.  My mother knew it was art, but even so, it really bothered her.

            What is art and what is obscenity, is never easy.  As much as we agree with the Supreme Court sentiment, that we know pornography when we see it, it often matters who is doing the looking.  What one person sees as beauty, another sees as dirty.  Many of our greatest works of art have been painted over, covered up, burned, and smashed by moral crusaders, trying to save us from ourselves.  Before you think this battle is one of the past, in the John Ashcroft Justice Department a drape was placed over the statue of Lady Justice because she had a bare marble breast. Nothing says hot, like a cold, gray, stone mommy part.  Who needs Playboy or Penthouse when you get Stone Cutter’s Monthly?

             In 1928, D.H. Lawrence, a 42-year-old British writer, in reaction to the horrors of the First World War, published a novel called Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  It was his last major work, because he would die just two years later.  There were no public printings in England.  When the writer died he was vilified and demeaned in obituaries because of this book, and his other works.  Instead, it had to be released in private, by publishers in Florence and Paris.  Police impounded the copies of it from anyone who dared to have it in their possession. For the next three decades, custom’s officials raided any book seller that smuggled an unexpurgated copy to a customer or friend.  In the 1950s, the Director of Public Prosecution of England destroyed 17 private printings. Similarly, it was almost impossible to get a copy in the states. In 1959, the British government changed its definition of pornography, stating that passages could not be taken out of context, rather the work must be taken as a whole. A year later another bookseller, Penguin Publishing, was put on trial for providing this book to the public. The government counsel summed up the case by stating, "Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters - because girls can read as well as boys - reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book you would wish even your wife or your servants to read?" The verdict of the one week trial was not guilty and the next day bookshops across the country sold 200,000 copies, its entire first run.  Within 6 weeks, 2 million copies of the book were sold.  The public had spoken.

            The synopsis is pretty straight forward. Lady Constance Chatterley is an upper-class woman, on a large estate, whose husband has been paralyzed.  Her frustration soon leads her into an affair with the estate’s gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. She is soon torn between her physical desires and her love for her husband. It is filled with dirty bits and a lot of 4-letter words.  Simple, that is what I thought. After all, I had seen the  low-budget 1981 sexcapade Skinamax film mainstay Young Lady Chatterley and the sequel, Young Lady Chatterley II,  playing in a brown paper bag near you.  Both simply were what they were, excuses to show skin.  They got several of the scenes from the books correct, but Lawrence would roll over in his grave watching these things.  These films get some of the parts right but don’t get the meaning of what Lawrence was trying to communicate.  In many ways, when Lawrence writes about sex, he writes about it in an almost religious nature. His works are almost a rejection of St. Paul where the flesh is considered evil and must be forsaken. His concern is wholeness. It is only in embracing, giving into the passions of the body, that one becomes whole.  Constance, as the story opens, is trapped in the passionless world of the head.  She has forsaken the physical aspects of existence.  It is only through integration, of both the mind and body, that she becomes whole.  In a sense, the act of making love is a means, not an end. 

Pascale Ferran is the first director in half a dozen films based on the book to get it right.  At over three hours long, he slowly builds the momentum of the story. From the moment Marina Hands (The Barbarian Invasions, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) appears, unlike her silicone forbearers, she is perfectly cast as Constance Chatterley, a woman devoted to taking care of her wheelchair-bound husband. She turns her energies outward to take care of the needs of others, even helping the servants with their household chores.  Ferran uses the metaphor of the wooden gate at the edge of the Chatterley’s property to show the duality of Constance life.  On one side of the gate is the orderly, well-manicured Chatterley estate, where injured Sir Clifford (Hippolyte Girardot) exists.  On the other side of the gate is the lush, wild forest with its animalistic passions overseen by Oliver Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc'h).  It is the simple vision of the bare torso of Parkin bathing that acts like a jolt, drawing Lady Chatterley in.  Slowly the reserved lady is drawn in until love or lust is in full bloom.

Art or pornography?  I guess it depends on which side of the gate you are on.  You can either focus on the dirty bits or see the whole of the larger narrative.  The hardest thing about being human is combining the head and the heart, the spirit and the flesh, or those two things in Italy.

Verdict: The Best Version Of Lady Chatterley To Date