Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence novel about an upper-class woman’s affair with a working-class man, scripted by David Magee, premiered in Telluride.
and the director’s interpretation of D.H. Lawrence’s century-old novel share a sensuous physicality, an appreciation for skin and muscle — how bodies move, how they spar, how they intertwine. In the 2019 film, the beautiful bodies belong to Matthias Schoenaerts and a wild horse; in, Emma Corrin and Jack O’Connell steam up the screen as kindred spirits ignited by carnal passion.
Lawrence was dismissed as a pornographer by many, and his oft-adapted 1928 novel, his last, was for years banned as obscene in several countries. Then it became part of the English-lit canon. Eventually it would be dissed by Susan Sontag as reactionary.