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Lady Chatterley's Lover
MGM // R // July 26, 2005
List Price: $14.95 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
1981's Lady Chatterley's Lover was produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the same two men who would go on to bring the world movies like Death Wish 3 and 
Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo. Try to picture the makers of Cyborg shepherding an arty, softcore period piece, and that mental image is...well, an exaggeration, but Lady Chatterley's Lover is still a pretty lousy movie.
Based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle) stars as Lady Constance Chatterley, a young woman whose wealthy husband is crippled during The Great War. As he's not physically capable of satisfying her or siring an heir to his name and fortune, Clifford (Shane Briant) encourages his wife to take a lover. Constance becomes fascinated with the gamekeeper at the Chatterley estate (Nicholas Clay), and after some initial discomfort, the two become lovers. Despite giving his consent to an affair of some sort, Clifford grows suspicious and resentful of his wife, and those feelings come to a head when he discovers the identity and unacceptably low class of her lover.
Lady Chatterley's Lover
is a profoundly boring movie. The overwhelming majority of its 104 minute runtime is dedicated to conversation, and although that would be fine if its characters were saying anything interesting, faux-intellectual rambling about torsos without heads and heavy-handed discussions about the meaning of love don't qualify. There's just an artificial quality about the movie as a whole -- the unconvincing delivery of the dialogue makes it impossible to lose oneself in the film, and scenes like a low-rent WWI battle and Constance's overdramatic nightmare are more likely to coax laughs than gasps. Neither the largely unlikeable characters nor the overall story are interesting enough for me to feel invested in anything that happens.
The eroticism feels awfully tame today, and it's unevenly distributed throughout the movie. The first love scene is fully clothed and isn't much racier than a daytime soap nowadays, and it takes nearly 45 minutes of setup to get to that point. Most of the sex comes in fairly quick succession, leaving long stretches of nothing in particular surrounding them. No longer the fresh-faced young star of Emmanuelle, Kristel looks a fair bit older than her 28 or 29 years at the time of filming, and her dialogue sounds as if it was recorded entirely in post. Briant and Clay both do fine jobs in their roles, despite being unable to elevate the material. The member of the cast that really stood out to me was Anthony Stewart Head in a bit part as a German, and that's just because I've watched too many episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and too many Taster's Choice commercials. I could lavish praise upon the set design and photography, but neither of those are going to salvage a movie this dull. No, it's not unwatchable, and I've certainly suffered through worse, but there's nothing about Lady Chatterley's Lover that compels me to recommend it.
Video: Lady Chatterley's Lover
is a double-sided disc with a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation on one side and a full-frame version on the other. (For those hoping that the full-frame version would expose more skin, sorry; there's a tiny bit more on the top and bottom of the frame, but the sides are fairly heavily cropped.) It's a nice looking DVD, though. The overabundance of soft lighting you'd expect in this sort of movie obviously limits the amount of detail, but the image is reasonably well-defined, and its colors appear to be accurately rendered, if a bit drab. The source material is mostly clean, with little visible wear or speckling. Things can get awfully grainy at times, but for the most part, the level of film grain seems appropriate. Fine.
Audio: The DVD includes a serviceable Dolby Digital 2.0 mono track (192Kbps). There's a detached, looped quality to the film's dialogue, but it comes through well enough, and sound effects and the score both sound alright as well. The disc is closed captioned, and subtitles are offered in English, French, and Spanish. Player-generated subtitles pop up by default in the few sections of the movie where its characters aren't speaking in English.
Supplements: No frills whatsoever. Anamorphic widescreen trailer. Static widescreen menus. Sixteen chapter stops. No insert.
Conclusion: Fish this vaguely erotic journey into tedium out of the cut-out bin in a few months, or better yet, Skip It.
Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo. Try to picture the makers of Cyborg shepherding an arty, softcore period piece, and that mental image is...well, an exaggeration, but Lady Chatterley's Lover is still a pretty lousy movie. Based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle) stars as Lady Constance Chatterley, a young woman whose wealthy husband is crippled during The Great War. As he's not physically capable of satisfying her or siring an heir to his name and fortune, Clifford (Shane Briant) encourages his wife to take a lover. Constance becomes fascinated with the gamekeeper at the Chatterley estate (Nicholas Clay), and after some initial discomfort, the two become lovers. Despite giving his consent to an affair of some sort, Clifford grows suspicious and resentful of his wife, and those feelings come to a head when he discovers the identity and unacceptably low class of her lover.
Lady Chatterley's Lover
is a profoundly boring movie. The overwhelming majority of its 104 minute runtime is dedicated to conversation, and although that would be fine if its characters were saying anything interesting, faux-intellectual rambling about torsos without heads and heavy-handed discussions about the meaning of love don't qualify. There's just an artificial quality about the movie as a whole -- the unconvincing delivery of the dialogue makes it impossible to lose oneself in the film, and scenes like a low-rent WWI battle and Constance's overdramatic nightmare are more likely to coax laughs than gasps. Neither the largely unlikeable characters nor the overall story are interesting enough for me to feel invested in anything that happens. The eroticism feels awfully tame today, and it's unevenly distributed throughout the movie. The first love scene is fully clothed and isn't much racier than a daytime soap nowadays, and it takes nearly 45 minutes of setup to get to that point. Most of the sex comes in fairly quick succession, leaving long stretches of nothing in particular surrounding them. No longer the fresh-faced young star of Emmanuelle, Kristel looks a fair bit older than her 28 or 29 years at the time of filming, and her dialogue sounds as if it was recorded entirely in post. Briant and Clay both do fine jobs in their roles, despite being unable to elevate the material. The member of the cast that really stood out to me was Anthony Stewart Head in a bit part as a German, and that's just because I've watched too many episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and too many Taster's Choice commercials. I could lavish praise upon the set design and photography, but neither of those are going to salvage a movie this dull. No, it's not unwatchable, and I've certainly suffered through worse, but there's nothing about Lady Chatterley's Lover that compels me to recommend it.
Video: Lady Chatterley's Lover
is a double-sided disc with a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation on one side and a full-frame version on the other. (For those hoping that the full-frame version would expose more skin, sorry; there's a tiny bit more on the top and bottom of the frame, but the sides are fairly heavily cropped.) It's a nice looking DVD, though. The overabundance of soft lighting you'd expect in this sort of movie obviously limits the amount of detail, but the image is reasonably well-defined, and its colors appear to be accurately rendered, if a bit drab. The source material is mostly clean, with little visible wear or speckling. Things can get awfully grainy at times, but for the most part, the level of film grain seems appropriate. Fine. Audio: The DVD includes a serviceable Dolby Digital 2.0 mono track (192Kbps). There's a detached, looped quality to the film's dialogue, but it comes through well enough, and sound effects and the score both sound alright as well. The disc is closed captioned, and subtitles are offered in English, French, and Spanish. Player-generated subtitles pop up by default in the few sections of the movie where its characters aren't speaking in English.
Supplements: No frills whatsoever. Anamorphic widescreen trailer. Static widescreen menus. Sixteen chapter stops. No insert.
Conclusion: Fish this vaguely erotic journey into tedium out of the cut-out bin in a few months, or better yet, Skip It.
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