Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

I may have heard about this film, I knew it was a costume drama or something, I didn't realise it was French or based on a less known erotic tale by D.H. Lawrence, but I was going to watch whatever. Basically in a large estate near Sheffield, Sir Clifford Chatterley (Hippolyte Girardot) who has become paralysed from the waist down after returning from the Great War. His caring young wife Lady Constance 'Connie' Chatterley (Marina Hands) is lifeless and with no self strength, and she finds a quiet hut retreat when her physician prescribes the open air. This hut is where the estate's games keeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coullo'ch) lives and works, and what starts as an awakening with nature, pheasant chick and daffodils growing, soon gets more intense. Connie and Parkin soon begin an affair and become passionate lovers, she now feels radiant and he has opened up himself as well, the only thing stopping becoming much more is class and age difference. One of the most memorable scenes sees the lovers running naked through the woods while it is raining, making love in the mud, washing off and placing green flowers on their bodies. In the end Connie takes a trip to France with her father Sir Malcolm (Bernard Verleyand) sister, and the affair comes to a subtle end and she stays with her crippled husband. Also starring Hélène Alexandridis as Mrs. Bolton, Hélène Fillières as Hilda, Sava Lolov as Tommy Dukes, Jean-Baptiste Montagut as Harry Winterslow and Christelle Hes as Kate. Hands is really pretty with and without clothes as the free spirited Lady needing to find herself, and Coullo'ch gets his moments as her lover wanting this resolution, it is a simple enough story, the nudity does not stop you lapping up the love story, slightly long, but overall a most watchable period romantic drama. Very good!

First we may talk about the general atmosphere of this remarkable movie. All sceneries are very beautiful, accurate and full of meaning: the landscapes, the interiors and the characters' clothes like we would expect in a reproduction of events which take place in mid-twenties of last century. In what concerns the plot and story we must keep always in mind that at the time most Victorian moral values still prevail and we must see the movie against this background so what wouldn't be revolutionary nowadays was revolutionary indeed at the time. This is the well told, well acted and well directed story of a woman awakening for the physical side of love life. She is the aristocratic rich wife of a no less aristocratic and rich man who is nevertheless an invalid ridden to a wheelchair for life and sexually impotent of course. This awakening begins when she sees for the first time her husband's gamekeeper naked above his waist and washing himself. She is then overwhelmed by a great psychological trouble and the ensuing uncontrollable need of meeting him again leads her to go to see him once more and finishing by surrender herself to make love with him. The first two love scenes were so quick that she doesn't get to any climax and only during the third scene where she takes a more active part does she reach a full orgasm. It's curious however (but quite in accordance with social patterns of that time) that during the first love scenes between the two the relation master-servant maintains itself before and after sex and only later does it gain a more personal and intimate nature. After the third love scene she even thanks him for it like if it had been a service rendered by him which offends him a lot. This adaptation of the second version of the literary masterpiece novel by the British writer D. H. Lawrence is a great success indeed. This novel was banned as pornographic when it was published first time and only in the sixties of last century a court declared it not pornographic according to he real difference between pornography and eroticism which exists though many people still don't know it but it's out of the scope of this review to explain. Sex is a force of nature and indeed a part of human relations and the literary or artistic works based on it can be object of aesthetic (in the broad sense) evaluation notwithstanding any possible moral evaluations which are not within the scope of a literary or a film essay.

Pascale Ferran's "Lady Chatterley" arouses the intentions of an intellectual mind rather than the consummate capitulations to the cataract of passion, and other sensual stimuli. Arriving with a brag sheet that includes five 2007 Cesar Awards, including ones for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Photography, the Ferran's overreaching adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's "John Thomas And Lady Jane", clearly has pedigree and an elegantly realised French sensibility. But there has to be something said for its lack of transgressions, an unwelcoming throwback to the days of muddled visions of carnal congress that was better served by the imagination in bodice-ripping erotic literature. Even by the nature of its anti-revisionist material and its ideas of sexual awakening as a process that by extension has to entail bridled fervour, the film's divisions are so neatly devised that there's nothing left for us to react to in its hollow exercise in ardent romanticism.

Cynics might be inclined to dub this 'the hippie version' of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", (though, in fact, it is based on an earlier draft called, appropriately enough, 'John Thomas and Lady Jane'). Certainly there is some serious flower-power going on between her ladyship and the game-keeper after one nude romp in the forest. Indeed that nude romp may be seen as a metaphor for the whole movie as Lady Chatterley starts to commune with nature in every sense. Even her affair with Parkin, (as he is called here), might be seen as just another way for her to find her 'natural' self since Parkin is portrayed as the persona of man in his most natural state.Pascale Ferran's film is long and leisurely, perhaps too long, but it is also passionate, erotic and ultimately quite moving despite Marina Hands' wan performance in the title role. Hands simpers her way through the film seemingly unsure of her feelings. It's a non-performance. A more polished actress might have been able to lift the movie into a different realm altogether. Jean-Louis Coullo'ch, on the other hand, catches the earthiness of Parkin perfectly. Like Hands it is a totally unpolished performance but it's the performance that the movie needs. It's he who raises the picture and he keeps you watching to the end. The film may be called "Lady Chatterley" but it is Parkin's (and consequently), Coullo'ch's picture.