This is the sixth screen version of D.H. Lawrence’s salacious novel. But Pascale Ferran, the first woman to take it on, opts for the draft known as John Thomas And Lady Jane, thus stripping the story of its baser instincts and reimagining it as a chivalric romance.
In this take, naive Marina Hands is rescued from a tedious life with her crippled war vet husband Hippolyte Girardot by the gruff sensitivity of gamekeeper Jean-Louis Coullo’ch, who can not only give her the child she craves, but also the sense of being alive she’s been denied.
Gloriously photographed by Julien Hirsch, this is an impressive treatise on novelettish love.