The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles, 1969)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Dir. Karl Reisz, 1981)
That frame above is one of the first images, preceding even the main title, in Karl Reisz’s film adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. For readers of Fowles’ novel, the gesture will register as clever and perhaps a little too early. The fourth wall that Fowles crushes in his novel at the 95 page mark isn’t even bothered with here. The film never gives the illusion that we are inside a story, never tries to trick us into thinking that we are transported to Lyme Regis, 1868, never even allowing us a moment to think that this might be about Victorian people in their own age. We know from the moment it begins that this movie is about Victorian people in our age, or in 1981. It works from the outside in, which pushes the viewer to see everything on screen as a construction meant to be juxtaposed against today. Or, perhaps, it is the other way around, and we are supposed to see everything we are today as set against the Victorians. The strategy is done in the spirit of Fowles’ novel, no doubt, but this new, more abrupt attack on the fourth wall pushes the limits of the novel’s original trick: there’s no apparent ringmaster this time, because Fowles, having finished the novel about 12 years before the movie was made and moved on to other things, is no longer here to guide us. Even the film’s screenwriter, Harold Pinter, never allows himself to be seen. What we are watching is actors in their “real lives” alongside the roles that they are made to play in the film version The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Instead of being on a sort of guided tour of his own story by Fowles, the concerns he delineates through commentary have now been narrativized for us. This is not how we would expect a high romantic film of the Victorians to open. If the novel reads as nearly impossible to adapt for film, that’s because it is, at least as it is written. But Reisz and Pinter do exactly what a good adaption should do: they bring all the literary tricks over into the film form without seeming to miss a beat, adjusting them to fit the new medium. Continue reading
The Paper Screen 