Of course, the books that have been deemed “unfilmable” and have subsequently been made into films are numerous, so there is nothing inherently interesting in the fact that The French Lieutenant’s Woman eventually made it to the screen. However, what does make it intriguing is the manner in which screenwriter Harold Pinter chose to adapt it, largely by playing the romantic narrative straight and then situating it within a wholly invented frame story about a film production of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The approach is not entirely successful, but it is daring and inventive, solving one of the fundamental problems of translating page to screen by maintaining the basic spirit of the material while developing it into something entirely new.

Meryl Streep, who had already been nominated for two Oscars, one of which she won (for Best Supporting Actress in 1978’s The Deer Hunter and 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer, respectively) the previous two years, stars in the dual roles of Anna, an American actress, and Sarah Woodruff, the Victorian-era social pariah she is playing. Similarly, Jeremy Irons, who was just emerging from a successful career on British television, plays the dual roles of Mike, a British actor, and Charles Smithson, the paleontologist Mike is playing. The majority of the film’s running time is spent with the Victorian-era story, which finds Sarah, who is, in her own words, a “remarkable woman,” an outcast from the polite society in the small harbor town of Lyme because of her presumed affair with the titular French lieutenant, for whom she waits each day at the end of a dramatically long stone pier that juts out into the ocean. Charles, a proper, upright gentleman, is engaged to Ernestina (Lynsey Baxter), the daughter of a wealthy businessman, although he maintains just a hint of scandal as a follower of Charles Darwin.

As the story progresses, Charles finds himself drawn more and more to Sarah, who is shunned by virtually everyone else—she is a “poor tragedy,” as they say. The idea is that Sarah is an enigma, a mysterious symbol of the kind of seductive, sexual female power that the Victorians sought to repress and control. It is no wonder, then, that Charles is drawn to her, and in the film’s best moments Streep and Irons have a breathy chemistry that defies social decorum. Sarah, of course, has nothing to lose in becoming involved with Charles, while he has everything to lose—his place in society, his fiancée, his wealth, his name. There is real danger there, and when the film works, it suggests a fierce conflict between the heart and the rigid Victorian social order, which allows no deviation from established norms, which are comically embodied by Mrs. Tranter (Charlotte Mitchell), a shrill old bird who hires Sarah for a brief time as a companion and berates her with her Christian chastity.

However effective the scenes set in the Victorian era may be, the framing story proves consistently problematic. On the one hand, Pinter uses it effectively as a sub for Fowles’s complex metafictional commentary on the central story, giving us a scene, for example, in which Anna is researching the Victorian era and mentions the shockingly high number of British women who had to resort to prostitution and the even more shockingly high number of men who they serviced, thus tearing away the veil of propriety often wrapped around that era.

The problem, though, is that the relationship between Anna and Mike is not particularly interesting. Both Anna and Mike are married when they engage in an affair during the making of the film, but because the affair is already in progress in the opening scene, it has little dramatic urgency. We don’t get to see it build and climax the way we do Charles and Sarah’s affair, which it is clearly meant to parallel (both feature men enraptured by women whose intentions remain enigmatic). Near the end the film their relationship becomes more interesting as filming wraps up and Anna must decide whether to return to her French husband or cast her life to the wind and go with Mike, who is intent on being with her. There are tenuous connections between the social differences involving marriage and sexuality between the 1870s and the 1980s, but they aren’t developed in a substantial way, which ultimately makes the framing story feel, if not entirely empty, at least trivial, especially when compared with the dramatics unfolding in the central story.

The film’s director, Karel Reisz, was not particularly prolific, but he was extremely accomplished and had already made at least one near masterpiece, 1960’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, one of the cornerstones of the British New Wave movement in the 1950s and ’60s. Reisz had experimented with multiple narratives in some of his previous films, so it’s not surprising that he would be drawn to Pinter’s approach to adapting Fowles’s novel. And, while Pinter’s approach doesn’t always pay the dividends it promises, there is much to admire in the film, including the performances by Streep and Irons, as well as an impressive cast of British character actors, and the beautifully wrought cinematography by Freddie Francis, who previously did magnificent work on Jack Clayton’s unnerving supernatural drama The Innocents (1961) and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), the latter of which was also set in the darker recesses of the Victorian era. When it works, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is nothing short of engrossing, which is precisely what those Victorian potboilers did so well. It is perhaps ironic, then, that the framing device, which is meant to draw our attention to the constructed nature of it all, doesn’t work nearly as well and ultimately fails to derail our enjoyment of that which we’re supposed to be questioning.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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