Connie Chatterley (Marina Hands) and gamekeeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) explore sexual freedom in LADY CHATTERLEY
CINÉSALON: LADY CHATTERLEY (Pascale Ferran, 2006)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 11, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 16
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
D. H. Lawrence’s oft-banned and censored Lady Chatterley’s Lover has been turned into several films, including highly erotic versions starring Sylvia Kristel, Patricia Javier, and Harlee McBride. But for his 2006 film, Lady Chatterley, French director Pascale Ferran turned to the second version of Lawrence’s tale of love, sex, and infidelity, adapting 1927’s John Thomas and Lady Jane into the César-winning Lady Chatterley. Marina Hands won a César as Best Actress for her sensitive portrayal of Constance Chatterley, wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley (Hippolyte Girardot), a bitter, wealthy aristocratic mine owner who was paralyzed from the waist down in World War I. Sent to give a message to the Chatterleys’ gamekeeper, Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h), Connie sees him with his shirt off, washing himself outside, and something instantly stirs inside her. She begins making frequent visits to his cabin in the forest, and soon they are having an affair. When Connie prepares to go on a trip with her sister, Hilda (Hélène Fillières), she hires Mrs. Bolton (Hélène Alexandridis) as Sir Clifford’s nurse, but Clifford and Mrs. Bolton grow suspicious of Connie’s long disappearances, forcing Connie to decide what path to take.
Marina Hands won a César as Best Actress for her moving portrayal of the title character in Pascale Ferran’s LADY CHATTERLEY
Lady Chatterley is no mere sex romp or erotic tale; Ferran (L’Âge des possibles, Bird People), who cowrote the César-winning script with Roger Bohbot and Pierre Trividic, treats the subject with an austere honesty. The sex scenes are not lurid but instead wholly believable as Connie and Parkin explore each other’s bodies and souls, their class differences creating a wall between them. The award-laden film also won Césars for Julien Hirsch’s lush yet old-fashioned cinematography and Marie-Claude Altot’s beautiful costume design, the precise details of which are particularly on display when Connie carefully undresses. The film is at times agonizingly slow-paced and too long at nearly three hours, but its overt Frenchness offers a fascinating take on a familiar story. Lady Chatterley is being shown November 11 at 4:00 and 7:30 as part of the French Institute Alliance Française CinéSalon series “The Art of Sex and Seduction,” with the later screening introduced by film critic Nicholas Elliott and followed by a wine reception; the series continues Tuesdays through December 16 with François Ozon’s Swimming Pool introduced by Ry Russo-Young, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake introduced by Alan Brown, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress introduced by Melissa Anderson, and François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women introduced by Laura Kipnis. There will also be talks, panel discussions, Jean-Daniel Lorieux’s “Seducing the Lens” photography exhibition, and other programs as part of “The Art of Sex & Seduction.”
In The Invisible Front, directors Vincas Sruoginis and Jonaš Ohman and producer Mark Johnston tell the story of the little-known Lithuanian resistance movement against the Soviets beginning in the early 1940s, as Stalin sought to spread his communist rule by invading Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The central focus is on the heroic Juozas Lukša, whose memoir, Forest Brothers: The Account of an Anti-Soviet Lithuanian Freedom Fighter, 1944-1948, is quoted extensively in the film. Using news reports, archival footage, and new interviews with surviving partisans, Soviet collaborators, and former Lithuanian president Valdas Adamkus, Sruoginis and Ohman relate the devastating tale of the 1940s resistance, celebrating the enduring spirit of the Lithuanian freedom movement, including the battle for independence in 1991. Unfortunately, the tale gets drowned in sentiment and propaganda, with dry narration and melodramatic music. Of course, the story is as relevant as ever as Vladimir Putin and the Russians again threaten to wreak havoc in the region, but the film is more a call-to-arms than a historical investigation. In fact, the filmmakers are raising money for the current Ukraine resistance; it might be a noble cause, but that purpose further marks the film as having too much of an agenda. The Invisible Front opens November 7 at Cinema Village, with Sruoginis, Ohman, and Johnston participating in Q&As following the 7:00 screenings on Friday and Saturday and the 1:00 show on Sunday.
Vanessa Lapa’s chilling feature documentary debut, The Decent One, reveals that there wasn’t a whole lot that was decent about Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief who was the architect of the Final Solution. In 2006, Lapa’s father purchased a collection of Himmler’s diaries, letters, documents, and photographs that had initially been discovered in his home by U.S. soldiers in May 1945. The treasure trove forms the narration for Lapa’s film, as actors read from many of the items in chronological order while home movies, still images, and rare archival footage of Himmler and the rise of the SS are shown onscreen. The film includes letters, postcards, and diaries from Himmler; his parents; his wife, Marga; his mistress, Hedwig Potthast; his beloved daughter, “Püppi”; his foster son, Gerhard von Ahé; and others, in which the Gestapo head discusses love and romance, racial purity, motherhood, duty and honor, order and obedience, the Jewish question, homosexuality, and subhumans, troubling views he developed from a young age. “People don’t like me,” he writes after not being accepted into a fraternal group at college. Looking for purpose in his life, he explains, “You start to think, if only there was a war again. If only I could put my life on the line. Fight! It would be a pleasure.” He was also fully aware of the brutality of the Nazi regime. “I can predict the horrors of the future,” he notes in 1927.
