Basing the film on an earlier version of the 1928 work called ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’, Ferran makes an admirable attempt to transpose novel to film and reflect Lawrence’s controversial views on sex, class and power. This beautifully photographed interpretation of his most infamous novel is, however, disappointing. Whilst subtly understated acting and a lyrical piano sound-track support a detailed mise-en-scene, the reason for failure lies with Lawrence’s writing style, too literary for easy transposition to a visual medium.

The events are straightforward: Sir Clifford Chatterley (Hippolyte Girardot) has been paralysed while fighting in WW1. His beautiful young wife Contance (Marina Hands) tends him at the family seat, Wragby Hall until a live-in nurse, Mrs Bolton, (Helene Alexandridis) is appointed. Constance is freed to begin a love affair with the estate’s gamekeeper, Parkin (Jean-Louis Coul’och) but problems arising from the gamekeeper’s former marriage, which surface when Connie is away on holiday, threaten to separate the lovers.

DH Lawrence struggled to become published in the early twentieth century, handicapped by his class and regional origins and because he wrote novels and short stories about working-class men and women, with an emphasis on sex. Considered vulgar by a London literary coterie still coming to terms with industrialisation and an educated proletariat, the frank portrayals of sex were particularly controversial and led to heavy censorship and banning. Lawrence’s themes, as well as his style, have more in common with the great European writers, Balzac, Flaubert and Lorca than the popular English novelists of his time such as Anthony Trollope and E.M. Forster.

In theory, the novels seem eminently filmable, with characters in settings that merge with their psyches as an expression of personality. Lawrence’s distinctive authorial voice and almost biblical cadences are missing from this film, but his the use of symbolism, reflected in novel titles like ‘The Rainbow’(1915), his short story ‘The Odour of Chrysanthemums’(1911) or the poem ‘Snake’(1923) is retained , as is the characterisation of the working class gamekeeper. Lawrence presented Nottinghamshire working people in a mould that was different from Dickensian grotesques or Thomas Hardy’s comic chorus of rustics. The use of dialect also upset the Bloomsbury set, and is understandably absent from this French-language version. In rendering Parkin inarticulate, however, the film makes him seem slow-witted. It is a shame that we have to wait until the end of the film for evidence of the striking eloquence in the book, merely represented by, ‘You have the gift of life’ as he describes his feelings for Connie. The same idea expressed as a response to natural beauty in the landscape slows the film considerably.

The French setting raises language problems of another kind. It’s acceptable for the French countryside to stand in for a Nottinghamshire estate, it’s disorientating when the characters’ very English names are pronounced with a French accent, especially the much-mentioned Mrs ‘Bolt on’.

Otherwise, mise-en-scene is the film’s major strength, from the wind-up gramophone vintage cars and costumes of Wragby Hall, like a more restrained Gosforth Park, to the woodland brooks and creatures. Connie’s yearning to be a bird is matched with the shot of a soaring kite, part of the films unrelenting mission to express ideas pictorially. Cloudy skies warn of impending trouble whilst an after-dinner anecdote of the soldier who continued charging even after his head was blown off lends context to the unfolding romance. The class divide is represented in a scene of lace-capped women cleaning silver, retainers on standby to haul Sir Clifford from car to wheel-chair and the summons to sort out strikes at the mine. The scene where he fails to drive the petrol-driven wheelchair up a slope without Parkin’s help reflects Lawrence’s views on an effete but dictatorial upper-class.

Other scenes recall important themes in Lawrence’s novels. Constance’s initial sight of Parkin washing echoes Lawrence’s typical expression of male physicality, a scene he first describes in his most autobiographical novel ‘Sons and Lovers’ (1913). The first daffodils near Parkin’s shack, the pheasant chicks which stir Constance’s maternal feelings, the gossiping villagers in the shop and the miners glimpsed through the car windows attempt an inclusive vision of Lawrentian themes. Connie’s incipient socialism, squashed as Clifford reminds her that she too depends on servants is a theme continued when Parkin voices his reluctance to accept her offer to set him up with a farm of his own – the male female relationship then would resemble too closely the master-servant one of which she seems unaware.

The absence of the authorial voice as narrator is not so successfully handled : the director plumps for a series of black-background stills with white print for commentary which although reminiscent of the era’s silent films are not well integrated into the general realism. The limitations of the method are apparent when the voice and image of Mrs Bolton takes over as narrator, reading the letters she sends to Connie on holiday in the South of France so that she, and we, are kept abreast of events. However, although ‘Lady Chatterley’ may join the likes of Ken Russell’s ‘Women in Love’(1923) as a creditable failure, it is as nearly a successful attempt at filming Lawrence as we are likely to get.