Based on a best-seller by British writer John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) deals with interesting topics: forbidden love, the psyche of a marked woman, fiction and reality --life and cinema. Fowles' first celebrated novel was The Collector, another fictitious account of a situation on the edge, in which a mad man kidnapped a girl in order to make possible for her to fall in love with him. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles again shows a preference for socially peculiar behaviours and doomed sentimental pairings, with both feet set firmly in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively.
The director of The French Lieutenant's Woman is Karel Reisz, who in 1960 made a landmark film called Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, starring Albert Finney, and later two of Vanessa Redgrave's best known vehicles: Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) and Isadora (1968). Meryl Streep has a showcase of her own genius as Sarah, the mysterious mistress, and as the actress who plays her in the movie within the movie, Anna. Streep's more than worthy partner in these intertwined lives is Jeremy Irons, the actor who in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988) would achieve a tour de force playing the two main roles; Irons was already a master of such challenging enterprises in 1981.
Of special note are also two elements: Harold Pinter's fragmented but lucid screenplay ("My only happiness is when I sleep. When I wake, the nightmare begins.") and Freddie Francis' cinematography. This one not only takes advantage of the prodigious marine landscape, melancholic itself, but of Streep's strangely virginal appearance.
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