Lady Chatterley's Lover: Lust in the wilderness

Correct me if I am wrong. But D H Lawrence’s lust…sorry, last novel the notorious Lady Chatterley’s Lover written in 1929, remains banned in India. This makes as much sense as using an umbrella to stop the Tsunami, especially now when a carnal version of the novel is now on Netflix.

What exactly made Lawrence’s novel one of the most banned works of art after Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses? The moralists said there was something distinctly satanic about an upperclass woman running down t her husband’s sprawling property to meet the gamekeeper whom she just can’t have enough of.

The sex, I mean.

A British aristocratic wife after the First World War claiming rights to physical gratification was shocking to the readers. In this cinematic version of D H Lawrence’s vivid vibrant novel about a woman seeking and getting sex outside marriage when she can’t get it inside, remains unacceptable even today.

When that progressive actress Rehana Sultan played a young wife to an aged man in Prem Parbat seeking physical satisfaction with a young man, she was all but spat at. If the purists had their way they would have probably stoned her in public.

Nothing much has changed over the years. Netflix’s well-timed well-aimed erotic escapade, partially poetic wholly carnal is brave audacious and faithful to the original . Many times I felt I was “reading” the film.

It doesn’t shy away from expressing the protagonist’s Connie (Emma Corrin) bodily needs bluntly…though I am not sure blunt is the preferred mood. Throughout, the film wears a dreamy look, oscillating opulently between the greenery of the forests and blue frames during the lovemaking in the cottage where the couple conduct their clandestine carnality.

Where the film slips up is in balancing the sex with the message on women’s right over her body. The sermons of escape from a dissatisfying marriage, fall short. What makes Connie’s fling complicated is that there is nothing wrong with her husband Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett) except that after being injured at war, he can’t satisfy his wife physically. Duckett makes the husband seem like a progressive man whose genital persuasions are stymied by destiny.

In contrast the lover Oliver as played by Jack O’Connell is an imploding ball of libidinous fire. Heis rough and uncouth. I can’t imagine him reading James Joyce, as he is shown to do in the film.

“You want me to be more coarse, do you?” he asks Lady Chatterley , Connie, during one of their unending trysts .

Emma Corrin takes the role of the bored neglected dissatisfied wife in The Crown (where she played Lady Diana) to another level in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Both she and her co-star have done full frontal sequences with great delight. Their nude romp in the rain will be talked about in the times to come as a concession to voyeurism in the guise of poetry.

Amusing in parts (the way the illicit couple starts making out anywhere in the farmland it seems as if human curiosity in those parts was at its lowest ebb), sublime in the way the lush greenery is shot like a bed for the lovers, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a faithful adaptation of a story of an unfaithful wife, true to the novel, though I have to admit the sex in Lawrence’s novel is far more graphic.

But of ‘coarse’.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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