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There
are few images in modern cinema as striking as that of Meryl
Streep in The French Lieuetenant's Woman as she stands in a
hooded cape at the end of a pier in the wildness of wind and water
as a storm begins to rage. It is a literary seduction, for
like the woman in the John Fowles novel on which the 1981 film is
based, Streep turns her head with her haunting, haunted eyes and
pagan look and the enchantment begins. The pier, the Cobb at
Lyme Regis, has a literary pedigree as well - it features in Jane
Austen's Persuasion, and is, as Fowles puts it so
poetically: "…a long claw of old gray wall that flexes
itself against the sea."
The
French Lieuetenant's Woman was directed by Karel Reisz, and
the screenplay was adapted by Harold Pinter. Streep plays
Sarah Woodruff, a clever, tormented woman who is apparently
waiting for her lover, a French lieutenant - and because of this
last reputation is in disgrace with the Victorian-era town;
Woodruff is the scarlet woman of Lyme. Jeremy Irons plays
Charles Smithson, a scientist about to marry his fiancée
Ernestina who is inexorably drawn into Woodruff's spell. The
triangulated relationship that begins with the scene on the Cobb
develops into a spellbinding tale of Victorian morality and love,
with a dash of Darwin, science, and poetry thrown in for good
measure.
The
genius in Pinter's adaptation is the conceit of a
film-within-a-film, the changing of the novel to add a secondary
story - Streep and Irons also play Anna and Mike, two actors who
portray Woodruff and Smithson in the film. Victorian society
is now dramatically contrasted with a contemporary
point-of-view. Anna and Mike are also having an affair,
mirroring the love interest in the film that they are acting
in. While Fowles used multiple endings in his novel, Pinter
gives the actors one fate and the characters they play
another. A trick of visual mimesis - two actors play four
people in love; the film-within-a-film and the dual endings act
like mirrors, refracting images of love back at each other.
Streep
is quite marvelous as the enigmatic Sarah Woodruff - every silence
and subtle gesture capturing the wild, dramatic Woodruff, a woman
ahead of her time and out-of-step with life around her.
There is something of both hunter and hunted animal in her
portrayal, and this ambiguity in her relationship with Jeremy
Irons's Smithson adds to the poignant, dramatic force of the film.
See:
The
French Lieutenant's Woman
Read:
The
French Lieutenant's Woman
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