Cinema: When Acting Becomes Alchemy

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On the stage Meryl Streep is shooting-star bright; on-screen she has won kudos without having to stretch herself. This is the first film that depends crucially on her to light a sexual-intellectual flame, and she draws on her compassion, intelligence, wit—and considerable resources of mystery—to create two utterly different characters.

Here is Sarah, in the sloping forest, her back to Charles, as she spins out the story of her liaison with the French Lieutenant Varguennes. With every new piece of information, each wisp of fact or filament of fantasy, Streep's expression and bearing change. She seems to be thinking onscreen, sorting through a hundred nuances before lighting on the one she uses—for just that moment. Sarah recalls the attentions paid her by Varguennes: a sweet, girlish, closemouthed smile illuminates her face, then fades with reticence and the next sentence. Sarah tells of the wine her lover urged on her— "It did not intoxicate me, I think it made me see more clearly" —and the voice rises, at once intoxicated and embarrassed. She has been toying nervously with her hair, and now, as she describes her seduction at the officer's hands, she loosens a knot of hair and caresses it down her shoulders, as Sarah would have done that night. By the end of her declaration, the night music in her voice has been replaced by bass tones, and a final loathing growl; "I am the French lieutenant's . . . whore!"

Fowles, who would drop by the film's location once or twice a week during the five weeks of filming in Lyme Regis, recalls that "Meryl had a copy of the book that she'd read just before the cameras turned. I was touched by that." Any viewer familiar with the novel will be touched too—by Streep's eerily exact translation of Fowles' descriptions into screen life. She does indeed speak "with odd small pauses between each clipped, tentative sentence." Her cheeks do rouge at a vivid recollection of her lover. But this is more than Xeroxing emotions. It is the creation of a film character that does precise and breathtaking justice to Fowles, to Sarah and the actor's art. Streep fully merits Sarah's proudest self-appraisal: "Yes I am a remarkable person."

Intelligent passion on the screen, two passionate intelligences behind it: a provocative combination. At times, though, the mixture of Streep and Irons, Pinter and Reisz, modern and period tales is like a garden party of charming strangers who never quite hit it off. At these moments the parallel-story device looks both cumbersome and timid. Pinter has pared away to the core of Fowles' novel, and saved only the skin; Reisz has withheld the emotional wallop without quite doing justice to the formal complexities of film narrative. The period story takes up about three-quarters of the film's running time and, like Sarah, is often troubling and sensuous and gravely beautiful. But whenever this story starts to pick up its skirt and run, it trips over the lever on the time machine, and the film flips forward into the less riveting present. Perhaps, if the movie had dealt solely with the period scenes, or if the 20th century framing story had been more subtly combined with it . . .