Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen FOWLES PLAY A TWICE-TOLD TALE THE MOVIE The French Lieutenant's Woman is, like the novel, a virtuoso performance. It's a feat, a technical tour deforce, a display of craft - and nothing...
...This kind of thing is nearly impossible for a modern novelist to do well...
...Otherwise, the whole Victorian flavor will be lost...
...Fowles's intermittent discourse on Victorianism gives him a way to space out the meetings between Charles and Sarah...
...But this doesn't finally compensate us for what's lost from the novel...
...He means that Sarah is an improbable character whom he had to avoid at all costs, so he made the avoiding of her into a strategy, a device that would work in his, and her, favor...
...He thereby prevents their story from gaining a twentieth-century momentum...
...In The French Lieutenant's Woman, he ultimately becomes more absorbed with the historical es says...
...The two stories are mirror images of each other, as the film acknowledges in two crucial scenes where Streep, first as Sarah, than Anna, gazes into a mirror in order to face a decision...
...Indeed, they often come perilously close to the same fate in even the best of the Victorian novels...
...Besides permitting him to keep a certain distance from his characters, to hold back from a foolish personal commitment to their romance, the essays let him keep his lovers apart by indulging in endless circumlocutions of his own...
...The feel of an emotion building over time has been retained, even though the plot has actually been telescoped into a kind of one-two punch...
...the only thing he could do with her, he claims, was "make a virtue of [my] own defects...
...If she weren't as obscure in the movie as in the novel, the jig would be up...
...Anna and Mike's affair is the keystone holding up the whole bridge from novel to movie, preventing Charles and Sarah from falling into the abyss of time as they cross between the two...
...Ever since the novel appeared, filmmakers have been queuing up to adapt it - Richard Lester, Fred Zinnemann, Michael Cacoyannis, Lindsay Anderson - and Fowles has laid down the same law to them all: "her motives should not be explained...
...Yet by repeatedly dissolving from Mike's and Anna's emotions into Charles's and Sarah's, the movie grafts reality onto the fantasy...
...It's the modern way...
...The solution the filmmakers have come up with is as clever as Fowles's own...
...Speaking of his lieutenant's woman, Sarah, John Fowles says cryptically, "I didn't understand her myself...
...Reisz and Pinter also realized that they needed a cinematic substitute for Fowles's discursiveness, a way to sneak a modern sensibility into the Victorian plot in order to make us take Sarah seriously without getting to know her...
...The modern story is generally retroactive in this way...
...At first Fowles makes Charles into a kind of intellectual fop...
...All the technique in each of them is just an attempt to cover up this fact...
...It's a feat, a technical tour deforce, a display of craft - and nothing more...
...Such scenes threaten at every turn to become transparent, incredible, corny...
...The sequence is striking just for its economy...
...I can't understand people who tell me that they love the Victorian romance, but hate the contemporary sub-plot...
...Director Karel Reisz and playwright Harold Pinter, who were finally awarded Fowles's plum, saw the wisdom of his ways...
...Her on-again, off-again relationship with the novel's aristocratic hero, Charles, is thus rescued from Victorian dalliance...
...Even after you take all Fowles's discourses out of the novel, there are still enormous batches of plot that any filmmaker would have to dispose of, condense...
...They postpone indefinitely the opportunity we seek to know her better, and the one Charles seeks, for that matter...
...Then slowly, subtly, almost imperceptibly, the meetings cease to be chance, etc...
...It's a comparison Fowles hoped I would think of...
...The advantage Fowles gains is that he can interlard his plot with essays on Victorian life and times...
...The movie, with its twin stories, tries to have the ending both ways...
...This difficulty of elision is neatly overcome by the rehearsals, for seeing the scene run through twice before it's done in earnest is as effective as any three of the novel's far more elaborate encounters between the lovers...
...They may have begun as a smokescreeen for the fiction, but in the end he is more interested in them than it, and they are what makes the novel worth reading...
...It's Daniel Martin, his autobiographical story of a screenwriter gone sour on Hollywood...
...More than just a daft free-thinker of her own day, Sarah becomes a prototype of the liberated woman of our day...
...Putting Charles off this way, along with us, is a real stroke qf genius on Fowles's part, for Charles has to come to Sarah, in the manner of Victorian love stories, very gradually...
...The ingenuity of this is apparent in, among other places, a little two-scene sequence near the film's middle...
...but then, once Sarah turns to him, we are to believe him worthy of her trust and passion even though he hasn't changed...
...The digressions give Fowles something to hide her behind...
...Since the movie hasn't time for the muddles of character development that Fowles lavishes on everyone except Sarah, everyone in the movie seems like her...
...First there have to be numerous chance meetings where he gazes at her while her eyes are downcast, after which she looks up at him and his eyes are averted, and nothing is said by either of them...
...Like Fowles's technique, Reisz's and Pinter's is multifunctional...
...The secret to its success is the way that the modern affair between Anna and Mike is made to reinforce, and in some ways stand for, the Victorian romance of Charles and Sarah...
...Fowles's characters are so arbitrary that he could change the happy ending he originally published to a sad one in subsequent editions...
...The presiding over the story of a modern consciousness imparts an unexpected modernity to Sarah's actions...
...This constant intrusion of the twentieth century lends to the declassee Sarah a moral character she badly needs, having none of her own...
...Dickens also changed an ending or two, I believe...
...The audience won't experience that nineteenth-century sense of time, of a love affair taking its own sweet time, upon which the novel depends completely...
...In the last analysis, the novel's characters and the film's are equally impenetrable, though sometimes in different ways...
...on the other hand, they also make her story seem eminently Victorian...
...There is some gain here, I suppose...
...Fowles has written a rather good Victorian novel, actually, but it's not The French Lieutenant's Woman...
...It becomes instead a precocious assertion of female independence...
...It is a modern sub-plot in which the actor and actress who play the leads in the movie (Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons) are also having an affair during the shooting of it...
...Anna's initial awkwardness at that rehearsal becomes an emotional surrogate for Sarah's initial shyness and uncertainty before Charles...
...Fowles's currency gives him a way to turn Sarah's opacity, her pure-driven blankness as a character, into intimations of feminism...
...JR.COLIN L. WESTERBECK...
...Beyond their respective techniques, what both novel and movie lack is a character, a real and human heroine...
...Anna can't seem to get into the groove of the scene, which goes very awkwardly in her first run-through...
...She and Anna are both capricious, inscrutable...
...Lacking them, the movie becomes a twice-told tale that doesn't make much sense in either version...
...Then suddenly we are plunged into the Victorian story itself, into the midst of the scene that they've been rehearsing, which is now performed at full dramatic power...
...In the first scene, the stars of the movie, Anna and Mike, are rehearsing the second scene...
...Sarah didn't bear too much looking into...
...The premise of the adaptation is that the affair between the two film stars is reality, while the Victorian melodrama in which they're cast is, therefore, just a fantasy...
...The inconsistencies are consistent throughout...
...But in the second, she does better, and Reisz's camera dollies in on her slightly to give the rehearsal more emotional oomph...
...He imposes on the human wooliness of his late 1860s the values of the late 1960s, when the novel was written...
...Sarah and Charles bask in the glow of Anna's and Mike's credibility as lovers...
...In the movie he is more like her, an enigma, someone neither ludicrous nor noble, just incomprehensible...
...Our response to the Victorian story relies upon the modern one...
...The veils of romance would fall away and reveal the burlesque underneath...
...In Sarah's story, feeling of course precedes sex...
...He palmed off a complete enigma as a woman of mystery, and the movie does the same...
...In Anna's story, which begins in bed with Mike, sex precedes feeling...
...But you are then faced with the prickly problem of keeping the liaison between Charles and Sarah from occurring too abruptly...
...The novel accomplishes this by telling its Victorian love story set on the Devon coast from a present-day point of view...
...Although the two sets of mores may sound nicely balanced, they're not...
...Fowles's approach works as expertly as one of those multifunctional systems on a spacecraft, the type designed so that the by-product of one function provides the fuel for another...
...On the one hand, Fowles's expatiations make Sarah seem unmistakably modern...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK...
...It's one where Sarah gets her dress caught on brambles while fleeing from an encounter with Charles...
Vol. 108 • November 1981 • No. 20
