When Acting Becomes Alchemy

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN

Directed by Karel Reisz; Screenplay by Harold Pinter

On that blustery March day in 1867, when Sarah Woodruff stood on the Lyme Regis jetty and turned slowly to stare at the young gentleman rushing to her aid, she burned her gaze into popular literary history. Sarah may have been jilted by her fickle French lieutenant, but she seized the imaginations and won the hearts of the novel-reading public.

Since its publication in 1969, John Fowles' multileveled romance has sold about 4 million copies and been translated into 18 languages. It is easy to see why. Against a backdrop of the lush Dorset landscape, two young lovers scale the Wuthering Heights of passion and despair. Charles Smithson, a kind and restless and resolutely ordinary gentleman of his day, meets Sarah Woodruff, once a genteel governess, now an outcast for her shameless "affair" with a capricious foreign sailor. That first gaze is enough. He abandons his wealthy fiancée, his friends and his good name to be with her—and, when Sarah mysteriously abandons him, to live with her memory.

A "hot" property, a spellbinding story, a pedigree of raves and awards, and just enough sex to set the toes acurl—with all these assets, a movie version of The French Lieutenant's Woman might have seemed inevitable and immediate. It was not to be. For Fowles had cloaked Sarah and Charles in a cunning conundrum. This Victorian novel is also a meditation on the novel form, and on a hundred other subjects that occupy the teeming mind of the book's 20th century narrator. He sprinkles references throughout, not just to Marx and Darwin but to latter-day prophets like Roland Barthes and "the egregious McLuhan." His scenic route through the Dorset flora and fauna includes side trips into the thickets of political and social theory. He announces his presence at every plot turn—probing his characters' thoughts on one page, shrugging genially that he's no mind reader on the next. And finally, this most dextrous of card sharks trumps his story. He provides three contradictory endings to his tale: in the first, Charles marries his fiancée, in the second Charles and Sarah are blissfully reconciled, in the third they part, never to see each other again.

It was just this aromatic blending of Victorian and modern sensibilities that made reading the novel such an exhilarating experience. The reader became a dolphin, swimming through the period story, then leaping up for 20th century air. In fiction, the narrator can achieve this feat simply by changing tenses: "They did this. I say that." But film lives in the eternal present; everything that happens happens right now. To be faithful to the structure of The French Lieutenant's Woman would run the risk of dislocating the moviegoer—right out of the theater.