Lady Chatterley | |
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![]() Theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Pascale Ferran |
Written by | Roger Bohbot Pascale Ferran |
Produced by | Gilles Sandoz |
Starring | Marina Hands Jean-Louis Coulloc'h Hippolyte Girardot Hélène Alexandridis |
Cinematography | Julien Hirsch |
Music by | Béatrice Thiriet |
Distributed by | Ad Vitam Distribution (France) |
Release date |
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Running time | 168 minutes 220 minutes (extended European edition) |
Country | France |
Language | French |
Budget | $2.3 million |
Box office | $4.7 million [1] |
Lady Chatterley is a 2006 French drama film by Pascale Ferran. The film is an adaptation of the 1927 novel John Thomas and Lady Jane , an earlier version of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), by D. H. Lawrence. It was released in France on 1 November 2006, followed by limited release in the U.S. on 22 June 2007 and in the UK on 24 August 2007. [2]
The film won the 2007 César Award for Best Film and stars Jean-Louis Coulloc'h and Marina Hands.
In an English country house, Sir Clifford Chatterley lives with his wife Constance. Severely wounded in World War I, he is paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair. Constance tries to be a good wife, but he is distant and her life is empty. One day the maid is ill and Constance goes to see Parkin, the gamekeeper, about some pheasants for the table. Approaching the hut in the woods where he works, she sees him stripped to the waist and washing himself; the sight perturbs her.
She is falling into a depression, for which the doctor says there is no physical cause, urging her to take charge of her life and not give in as her mother did. Told that the first daffodils are blooming in the woods, she ventures out to pick some, but the effort tires her and she has to sit. Parkin grudgingly lets her rest on the steps of the hut, where she falls asleep. Feeling relaxed there, she resolves to visit more often and asks her husband for a duplicate key. He says he does not have one, so Constance asks Parkin, who is reluctant but as an employee has to, in the end, produce one.
She starts going to the hut regularly, taking an interest in the taciturn Parkin's work. When taking hold of a recently hatched pheasant chick, the tremor of new life in her hand sets Constance weeping uncontrollably. Parkin comforts her and, with her mute assent, has brief forceful sex. He is uneasy afterwards, but Constance feels liberated and starts meeting him secretly for more sessions. As he gets more comfortable with her, their lovemaking becomes more tender and intense, one day cavorting naked in the rain and decorating each other with flowers.
Sir Clifford confronts Constance with a rumor that she is pregnant, which she denies. The two discuss the possibility of her conceiving a child with another man, giving her a baby and Sir Clifford an heir. She says she might do so when she goes on holiday with her father and sister to the Mediterranean. Taking more of an interest in life, Sir Clifford buys a motorized wheelchair and ventures into the woods, but it gets stuck and stalls. In rage and frustration, he will let nobody help him, though eventually Constance and Parkin do push him home.
Before going off on holiday, Constance spends the whole night with Parkin in his cottage, from which he has cleared all traces of his wife, who has gone to live with another man. She tells him she has money from her dead mother and would like to buy him a small farm so that he could be independent. While on holiday, Constance gets a letter from Sir Clifford's nurse with all the local gossip. This includes the news that Parkin's wife, thrown out by her lover, returned to their home. Parkin went to court to get her thrown out, but was told he would have to divorce her first.
Constance heads back to England to find that Sir Clifford has been making further efforts to live more normally and has begun to walk on crutches. She also learns that, in a fight with the lover, Parkin was beaten up and, because of the scandal, has had to resign as gamekeeper. Going to see Parkin, she tells him she is pregnant, but he is not happy because the child will, in the eyes of the law, be Sir Clifford's. Having lost his job and his home, he will have to live with his mother and find work in a factory. He talks of emigrating to Canada, but Constance says that is no solution and wants him near her. Eventually, he accepts her offer of buying him a small farm and agrees that they must part until the baby is born. If she then decides to leave Sir Clifford, he says he will take her.
The film was shot in France's former Limousin region, at the Château de Montméry in Ambazac (Haute-Vienne) and in Marcillac-la-Croisille (Corrèze). [3]
Lady Chatterley's Lover is the last novel by English author D. H. Lawrence, which was first published privately in 1928, in Italy, and in 1929, in France. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books, which won the case and quickly sold three million copies. The book was also banned for obscenity in the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Japan. The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex and its use of then-unprintable profane words. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.
In the United Kingdom, a gamekeeper is a person who manages an area of countryside to make sure that there is enough game for hunting, or fish for fishing, and acts as guide to those pursuing them.
David Magee is an American screenwriter who was nominated for a 2004 Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Finding Neverland. Along with Simon Beaufoy, he wrote the screenplay for Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams, which was released in 2008.
Zoe Tate is a fictional character from the British soap opera Emmerdale, played by Leah Bracknell. She made her first screen appearance during the episode broadcast on 12 December 1989. Zoe was involved in many major storylines during her time on the soap, including the deaths of her father Frank and brother Chris, the betrayal and departure of her stepmother Kim, coming out as lesbian and a battle with schizophrenia. Zoe became the first lesbian character in a British soap opera when she came out in 1993. She departed on 22 September 2005.
A mistress is a woman who is in a relatively long-term sexual and romantic relationship with someone who is married to a different person.
Lady Chatterley's Stories is an erotic softcore TV show that aired on Showtime which ran for two seasons.
An Ideal Husband, also known as Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, is a 1947 British comedy film adaptation of the 1895 play by Oscar Wilde. It was made by London Film Productions and distributed by British Lion Films (UK) and Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation (USA). It was produced and directed by Alexander Korda from a screenplay by Lajos Bíró from Wilde's play. The music score was by Arthur Benjamin, the cinematography by Georges Périnal, the editing by Oswald Hafenrichter and the costume design by Cecil Beaton. This was Korda's last completed film as a director, although he continued producing films into the next decade.
The Sleeping Car Murders is a 1965 French mystery film directed by Costa-Gavras from the novel by Sébastien Japrisot. It stars Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Michel Piccoli, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Catherine Allégret, Jacques Perrin, Charles Denner and Pascale Roberts. The film was the directorial debut of Costa-Gavras, to be followed later by other, more politically-oriented work.
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a 1981 erotic romantic drama film directed by Just Jaeckin, based on D. H. Lawrence's 1928 novel of the same name. The film stars Sylvia Kristel and Nicholas Clay.
John Thomas and Lady Jane is a 1927 novel by D. H. Lawrence. The novel is the second, less widely known, version of a story that was later told in the more famous, once-controversial, third version Lady Chatterley's Lover, published in 1928. John Thomas and Lady Jane are the pet names for the genitalia of the protagonists.
"The book, according to a statement from Ferran, is a more simple, direct telling of the tale, with a few key differences. Parkin, the gamekeeper, is here a simple man from the village who chose his profession over being a miner, so that he could preserve his solitude. In the 1928 novel, he’s named Mellors and, though working-class, is a former army officer." — Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times arts critic
Lady Chatterley is a 1993 BBC television serial starring Sean Bean and Joely Richardson. It is an adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, first broadcast on BBC1 in four 55-minute episodes between 6 and 27 June 1993. A young woman's husband returns wounded after the First World War. Facing a life with a husband now incapable of sexual activity she begins an affair with the groundskeeper. The film reflects Lawrence's focus not only on casting away sexual taboos, but also the examination of the British class system.
Hippolyte Girardot is a French actor, film director and screenwriter. He is the father of actress Ana Girardot.
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A Woman of Affairs is a 1928 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer synchronized sound drama film directed by Clarence Brown and starring Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Lewis Stone. While the film has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects using both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film process. The film was based on a 1924 best-selling novel by Michael Arlen, The Green Hat, which he adapted as a four-act stage play in 1925. The Green Hat was considered so daring in the United States that the movie did not allow any associations with it and was renamed A Woman of Affairs, with the characters also renamed to mollify the censors. In particular, the film script eliminated all references to heroin use, homosexuality and syphilis that were at the core of the tragedies involved.
The Ware Case is a 1938 British drama film directed by Robert Stevenson and starring Clive Brook, Jane Baxter and Barry K. Barnes. It is an adaptation of the play The Ware Case (1915) by George Pleydell Bancroft, which had previously been made into two silent films, in 1917 and 1928. It had been a celebrated stage vehicle for Sir Gerald Du Maurier. The film was made at Ealing Studios with stately home exteriors shot in the grounds of Pinewood. Oscar Friedrich Werndorff worked as set designer.
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Born to Love is a 1931 American pre-Code melodrama film, directed by Paul L. Stein from an original screenplay by Ernest Pascal. It starred Constance Bennett, Joel McCrea and Paul Cavanagh in a lovers' triangle set in London during World War I. It was only the second film produced by RKO Pathé after the merger of the two studios, and according to RKO records, it made a profit of $90,000.
Pascale Ferran is a French film director and screenwriter. In 2007, her film Lady Chatterley won five César Awards including Best Film, Best Cinematography and Best Adaptation. Her 2014 film Bird People was selected to compete in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Ferran also wrote the screenplay for The Red Turtle, an animated film by Michael Dudok de Wit, that competed in the Hawaii International Film Festival on 12 November 2016.
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a 2015 British historical romantic drama television film starring Holliday Grainger, Richard Madden and James Norton. It is an adaptation by Jed Mercurio of D. H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and premiered on BBC One on 6 September 2015.
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