The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Karel Reisz (1981)
‘I’ve not seen this since when it first came out,’ said my nearest neighbour, as we waited in NFT2 beforehand. ‘Same here,’ I replied. I didn’t tell him that just about all I could remember about The French Lieutenant’s Woman was seeing it on the evening of Charles and Diana’s wedding day. My recall of similar pairings is effortlessly intact: Princess Anne and Mark Phillips in the morning, Last Tango in Paris the same afternoon; William and Kate followed by The Browning Version. The former is understandable: it was November 1973, a few weeks before I was officially old enough to see an X film. The 2011 souvenir is merely irritating since I didn’t even watch the wedding. Although I often wish my memory were better at retaining more valuable things, a second viewing of Karel Reisz’s film left me doubtful if it’s worth keeping in mind.
Post-modern fiction puts a particular slant on the never-ending debate over whether a film based on a novel should be judged with or without reference to its source. If the adapter is ‘faithful’ to a post-modern text, what is he or she being chiefly faithful to – the plot and characters, the underlying themes or the novelist’s use of techniques such as deconstruction and unreliable narrators? In order to appreciate the screen adaptation of a piece of ‘historiographic metafiction’ (as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman has been described), is it more important for the audience to be familiar with the original work than it was for viewers of, say, David Lean’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist? If the answer to that question is yes, it may partly explain why I was bored by Reisz’s film of a book I haven’t read. I can see from The French Lieutenant’s Woman that, for example, the title character Sarah Woodruff (Meryl Streep) appears to have stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting; that, as a gentleman palaeontologist, the male protagonist Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons) is also something of a Victorian archetype. Smithson’s forename reinforces this idea; the forename and Cockney accent of his servant Sam Farrow (Hilton McRae) bring to mind another nineteenth-century literary serving man, Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers. Yet seeing that last connection falls well short of understanding that, according to one scholarly article on Fowles’s text[1], ‘the tension between Sam [Farrow] and Charles Smithson importantly demonstrates Marxist class struggle’. It’s hard for a newcomer to the material to watch the movie and infer much of Fowles’s commentary on Victorian life, art and politics.
When The French Lieutenant’s Woman, after several false starts involving other writers and directors, reached the screen in 1981, the production budget was $8m (somewhere in the region of $40m today). Although, at that cost, the people who made the film could hardly be cavalier about its commerciality, the novel had, within a decade or so of its publication in 1969, sold many copies. (I’m not sure at what point it became the ‘bestseller’ Wikipedia now describes it as.) I’d guess that Karel Reisz and Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplay, assumed that a fair proportion of the putative audience would already know the book, though I admit my guess is based largely on how little Reisz and Pinter seem to do to help the uninitiated. That’s not, however, what the movie’s first sequence predicts. We see a film crew preparing to shoot a scene; a voice off-screen asks the cloaked, hooded figure of a woman, ‘Ready, Anna?’ and the figure nods her head. We can just about see Meryl Streep’s face inside the hood and recognise the costume as the one she’s wearing on the poster for Reisz’s film. In other words, we realise instantly that Streep isn’t simply playing the main part in The French Lieutenant’s Woman: she’s playing an actress playing the main part in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
This immediate and apt reflection of Fowles’s book’s awareness of its contrivances introduces a bifurcated narrative, comprising the Victorian-era story of Charles Smithson’s obsession with the mysterious Sarah Woodruff and the extra-marital affair between Anna and Mike (Jeremy Irons again) – the two actors playing Sarah and Smithson in the film being made within the film before our eyes. As this latter part of the narrative proceeds, it’s exposed as something less smart than the device revealed in the opening sequence. Its main purpose is obvious from the moment when, at a social gathering, Anna’s husband Davide (Gérard Falconetti) asks Mike how the film will end since the book has two endings – one happy, one unhappy. The two stories told by Reisz and Pinter are linked only by the fact that, in each of them, the man played by Jeremy Irons is increasingly frustrated by the elusiveness of the woman played by Meryl Streep. Charles Smithson’s eventual rediscovery of Sarah Woodruff allows for a very low-key happy ending to the nineteenth-century aspect; Anna’s swift departure from a wrap party allows a more decisively unhappy ending to the modern-day one. Mike, left standing at a window as her car drives off, calls her name – except that he calls ‘Sarah’. As well as being banal, this moment seems a cheat: up to this point, Pinter has (rightly) disdained the cliché of actors becoming caught up in the characters they’re currently involved with. There’s been no suggestion hitherto that Mike is obsessed less by Anna than by the woman she’s playing.
The recreation of Victorian Lyme Regis and Freddie Francis’s varied lighting are impressive. So is Meryl Streep – up to a point. A couple of years ago on The Graham Norton Show, pressed to name a film in which she felt disappointed by her work, Streep chose The French Lieutenant’s Woman because she ‘didn’t feel the character’. That’s certainly the impression you get from watching her as Sarah Woodruff. Her meticulous, mannered interpretation could be justified as analogous to the self-aware artifice of the novel yet it’s hard to accept on those terms when another unsatisfying, nearly contemporary Streep performance, in Still of the Night (1982), was conspicuous for just the same qualities. Her playing of Sarah sowed the seeds of critical and public perceptions of Streep as ‘cold’ and ‘technical’. This was also her first ‘accent’ role in cinema (though not her first on screen: that came in the 1978 TV mini-series Holocaust.) Watching Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman today, what’s most striking is that, despite the severe limitations of the Anna-Mike thread, she’s more compelling as the egotistical American actress than she is as the singular proto-feminist Sarah Woodruff. (The implication of Fowles’s title that this woman belongs to a man is no doubt intentionally misleading.) Streep is splendid in a tense exchange of small talk between Anna and Mike’s wife Sonia (expertly played by Penelope Wilton). This conversation injects a shot of ‘good’ Pinter into the twentieth-century story, most of which is so tamely conventional it hardly feels like Pinter at all.
Jeremy Irons broke through in 1981 thanks to the combination of this film and playing Charles Ryder in the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. He’s very proficient as this other Charles and as Mike, though (in retrospect anyway) unsurprising in both roles. Lynsey Baxter does well as Smithson’s entitled but vulnerable fiancée Ernestina. A strong collection of older British character actors fill the smaller parts – Alun Armstrong, John Barrett, Patience Collier, Richard Griffiths, Colin Jeavons, Leo McKern, Charlotte Mitchell, Liz Smith, Peter Vaughan and Doreen Mantle (Mrs Warboys in One Foot in the Grave), who appears fleetingly as a train passenger. One of the few light-hearted pleasures of the film is seeing some of these people –also, of course, the cast of the ‘interior’ version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman – released from period costume into casual modern clothes at a lunch chez Mike and Sonia and the concluding wrap party.
20 August 2018
[1] Landrum, David W, ‘Rewriting Marx: Emancipation and Restoration in The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ (Twentieth Century Literature, Spring 1996)