Cinema: When Acting Becomes Alchemy

(5 of 6)

A suspicion begins to form in the viewer's mind. What if this French Lieutenant is designed to do more than just tell two stories? What if it means to be a demonstration of actors' alchemy, not just into the identities of the characters they play, but into artists? Early in the film, Mike and Anna are rehearsing a scene that takes place in the woods: Sarah slips and falls into Charles' arms. The first run-through is perfunctory. Anna says, "Let's just do it again, O.K.?" She walks back to her mark, turns his way, catches his eye—and this time there's electricity. She walks toward him and, suddenly, falls—and as she falls we are transported with her into 1867, into the sequence as shot, into an actor's intelligence and urgency.

But the film is still more cunning, for it deals as well with the seductive ways a story's characters can become the actors playing them. In one respect, this simply acknowledges star quality: the audience adds to Sarah's history all they know of Streep from seeing her earlier films and reading about her private life. But in the final meeting of Charles and Sarah, three years after she has vanished, the film becomes something else—more than a recreation of the separate fictional realities of then and now.

This is the book's "happy ending," in which the lovers are reconciled after Charles learns that Sarah has been caring for the child conceived in their one night of consummation. But in the film, everything seems slightly "off." The lighting, which in the earlier period scenes was dense and murky, is here bright and unrelenting. The camera stands back too far to encourage the viewer's involvement in an intimate scene. The acting is oddly strident and ragged, as if a failed first take had somehow made it into the final cut.

Sarah falls in this scene, but she lands with an indecorous thud and giggles nervously, as the modern Anna might. Charles is hitting his emotional keys too hard: he sputters and foams out of control. There is not even a mention of their child, no real explanation for Sarah's disappearance. The moment when the lovers finally embrace—the climax awaited by every reader of the novel, anticipated by every new viewer of the film—seems ruinously flat.

But wait. Those who find it so may have been seduced by the expectations the film has raised. For this sequence is neither period nor modern, neither the Fowles story nor the framing story, but a third dramatic level. Look at it this way: the viewer is in the screening room of Mike's fevered imagination. This is Mike playing Charles, and Anna playing Sarah. But the film has followed Mike's obsession to the point where he can no longer distinguish between the two. Mike has become not only the on-screen lover, but the off-screen lover and the film maker as well, and this French Lieutenant's Woman is the film he would have made.