Anna and Mike portray two characters in a film set in 19th century England who fall in love despite the fact that Mike’s character is engaged. In this filmization of John Fowles’ original novel, we watch as Sara, an Englishwoman ruined by an affair with a French lieutenant, enters into another disastrous relationship. Viewers are made aware that what they’re seeing is a film. This is done by surrounding the story with a modern narrative.
An astounding array of talent came together for the big-screen adaptation of John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a postmodern masterpiece that had been considered unfilmable. With an ingenious script by the Nobel Prize–winning playwright Harold Pinter, British New Wave trailblazer Karel Reisz transforms Fowles’s tale of scandalous romance into an arresting, hugely entertaining movie about cinema. In Pinter’s reimagining, Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep star in parallel narratives, as a Victorian-era gentleman and the social outcast he risks everything to love, and as the contemporary actors playing those roles in a film production, and immersed in their own forbidden affair. Shot by the consummate cinematographer Freddie Francis and scored by the venerated composer and conductor Carl Davis, this is a beguiling, intellectually nimble feat of filmmaking, starring a pair of legendary actors in early leading roles.
“The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is a beautiful film to look at, and remarkably well-acted. Streep was showered with praise for her remarkable double performance, and she deserved it. She is offhandedly contemporary one moment, and then gloriously, theatrically Victorian the next. Opposite her, Jeremy Irons is authoritative and convincingly bedeviled as the man who is frustrated by both of Streep’s characters. The movie’s a challenge to our intelligence, takes delight in playing with our expectations, and has one other considerable achievement as well: It entertains admirers of Fowles’s novel, but does not reveal the book’s secrets. If you see the movie, the book will still surprise you, and that’s as it should be. – Roger Ebert
Starring Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Hilton McRae.
Rated R.