Cinema: When Acting Becomes Alchemy

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The slap of a clapper board indicates the start of a "take," and of this film. Few will note that the names on the slate are fictitious, not those of Reisz and his cinematographer Freddie Francis; but it is the first hint of the life-to-be outside the walls of the period story. The audience will learn soon and often enough: 14 times, the "present" film-within-the-film will give way to the "past" film-within-the-film-within-the-film. Inside the deepest box it is 1867, and Charles Smithson is again living out his perplexed obsession with the Scarlet Woman of Lyme.

Containing this plot is another box marked 1981, when The French Lieutenant's Woman is being filmed in Lyme Regis. Mike (Jeremy Irons), a young British actor, is playing Charles; Anna (Meryl Streep), an American actress, is playing Sarah. Mike, we soon learn, is in love. To Anna, he is little more than an electric blanket—something to keep her warm in bed while on location. And so the two play out a familiar film-set romance: Mike pressing, Anna depressing; Mike the Method actor living out his role, Anna the detached professional. Is Mike infatuated with Anna or with Sarah? By the end of the film he will not know—for Mike is an up-to-date, slightly callower version of the character he is playing. He is the eternal man-boy in love with enigmatic modern woman—who has evolved into a complex creature beyond the comprehension of Mike or any other man.

Anna seems almost alarmingly controlled, unreachable—as modern as any Cosmo girl. But what about her Victorian twin? Is Sarah, as Irons describes her, "the breath of a new century"? Or is she simply mad—driven to psychosis by the conflicting pulls of passion and repression? "I hope by the end she establishes that she's probably not insane," muses Fowles. "Or if she is, it's a fruitful kind of insanity." Mad or just modern, it hardly matters, for Sarah is above all an actress. In one of the film's most powerful scenes, we find Sarah in her room, at her mirror. One hand clutches her shawl, the other furiously sketches self-portraits—anguished cartoons of the madwoman of Lyme Regis. They could be rough drafts for an asylumed future, or rehearsals for her climactic meeting with Charles, but they are certainly the carefully fevered preparations an actress makes for her big scene.

Formally, The French Lieutenant's Woman may be remarkable for its shuffling of tenses and tensions; it is also a film of meticulous attention to the details of the 1860s and today. But its potential appeal for the broad audience rests on the chemistry of its cast—on the attractive night music played in this quartet for two voices: Sarah-Anna and Charles-Mike.

In his first major film role, Jeremy Irons must carry both stories and the audience with him; he must lay the tracks that lead Charles and Mike to their fateful folly. Says Karel Reisz: "Jeremy has the authority of a leading man without the narcissism that so often goes with it." Indeed, there is something of the fervid adolescent in his playing of these serious young men. It takes doomed love to test, toughen and mature Charles—and a compelling actor-personality to play him. Irons is equally persuasive as performer and fond lover. As Reisz notes, "Jeremy does have his Heathcliff side."