Lady Chatterley’s Lover review: Ripe with passion-free, soullessly efficient sex

Can a film with an entire scene of full-frontal frolicking in the rain still feel polite? Yes, as it turns out. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the god tier in sexy literary classics, but the sexiest thing in Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s Netflix adaptation are the shots of the English countryside. That surely doesn’t feel right.

Emma Corrin plays posh, yearning Constance Chatterley; Jack O’Connell is Mellors, the gruff gamekeeper who catches her eye after her husband, the upper-class Sir Clifford, is maimed in battle. I so wanted to love this film. A literary period drama? Sexual tension across the class divide? The shadow of war? Wonderful actors? It must be nearly Christmas. But instead of crackling with electricity, it just hums like an energy-efficient light bulb.

DH Lawrence’s now infamous 1928 novel is about the human spirit recovering from a cataclysmic war. “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically,” says its opening line. Thanks to the 1960 obscenity trial and Philip Larkin’s subsequent name drop in his “Annus Mirabilis” poem, it carries a legacy of forcing us up to speed with it, of symbolising earth-shattering moments of change. So, on the face of it, this seems a fascinating time to do it again – when sexual politics have become such contested ground and we seem to be craving a new world order. And yet it all just feels nothingy: pleasant but pointless.

It begins with an intriguing mood: Connie and Clifford (Matthew Duckett) have just married and both seem giddy to the point of drunkenness. Is it love, or the adrenaline of knowing all of the men are 99 per cent likely to die in the war? The conflict invades moments of intimacy – “I can’t stop thinking about going back to the front,” says Clifford on their wedding night. Upon his return to his estate, Wragby Hall, he has been rendered impotent as well as paralysed: Connie is now a carer rather than a wife.

Soon, though, the film begins to simply give us images of moods, rather than creating them. We see Connie reading in a conservatory, bored and full of inertia. We glimpse the indignity of her having to bathe helpless Clifford. We witness her handle newborn chicks once her passion awakens. Wragby Hall, meanwhile, is full of taxidermied animals. It never builds to much of an atmosphere. This is Lady Chatterley: the Pinterest board.

Connie’s cheeky grin, after she catches sight of Mellors’ bare bum as he showers outside, hints at coming naughtiness. But together, the pair don’t have the devastating chemistry that the story demands – and, as such, nothing much feels at stake. There are a lot of sex scenes, yes. But we don’t feel the passion, the lust. It’s soporific, scented-candle sex, soullessly efficient.

Part of the problem is that Corrin’s portrayal of Connie almost feels too modern. Here, Connie is a woman with agency and confidence who embarks on an unapologetic quest for self-discovery. That naked rain dance scene shows the couple to be loud, proud and fearless – but I wondered if it might make sense for her to be a little more afraid of what she’s rousing in herself, something wilder in her overcoming social expectations completely in spite of herself.

Lady Chatterley isn’t just a story about sex – it’s also about class, too. But other than some brief mentions of Sir Clifford treating Wragby staff badly, that theme feels underserved here, with Joely Richardson miscast as his nurse, Ivy Bolton (she played Connie in Ken Russell’s 1993 version). What we get is a film that’s watchable, when it could have been wonderful.

Those shots of the countryside, though. Sir Clifford looks at the green fields at one point, and says, “I mind not being able to have a son here more than anywhere else.” Can you blame him? Those are some sexy green fields.

Dir: Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. Starring: Emma Corrin, Jack O’Connell, Matthew Duckett, Joely Richardson. 15, 126 minutes.

‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ can be streamed on Netflix from 2 December