When Acting Becomes Alchemy

By RICHARD CORLISS

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 fiancee, 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 fiancee, 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.

Fowles knew better than anyone else that filming his book would be a daunting process. He had been less than ecstatic about William Wyler's interpretation of his first published novel, The Collector; and though Fowles wrote a script for the movie version of his second, The Magus, he--and many critics--thought the film a disaster. The third time, he would play it safe: he would retain veto power over the director. In fact, Fowles had just the man for the job; Karel Reisz, whose films (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Morgan) dealt with intelligent outsiders like Sarah Woodruff, and who was then completing a period film on the life of Isadora Duncan. But Reisz, after reconstructing the early 20th century for Isadora, was reluctant to plunge into Victoriana.

And so the options multiplied, the screenplays accumulated, the frustrations mounted. Fred Zinnemann, the Oscar-winning director of From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons, had a script by British Television Playwright Dennis Potter; but Zinnemann could not find the right actress. (Fowles' own choice at the time was Vanessa Redgrave.) Mike Nichols tried, and so did Franklin Schaffner. Recalls Fowles: "A Hollywood scriptwriter came over to do that one. I'm told he had a nervous breakdown after six weeks." Finally, in 1979 Reisz reconsidered and invited Harold Pinter, Britain's master playwright, to collaborate with him on the project.

Harold Pinter carves theatrical art from minimalist melodrama: his plays' silences have the whipcrack of menace. He is also a screenwriter whose adaptation of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between examined the tensions between the entrenched upper class and the emerging educated proletariat, between the fond, painful past and the remorseless present. Karel Reisz is the technician as artist: he makes films with taste, scope and, always, discretion. He is an ideal "reader" for the script or novel to be filmed; he makes writers' visions his own, to help the viewer see more clearly. Together they could perhaps make something faithful and original out of the book.

For three weeks Pinter and Reisz haggled over a table in the study of Reisz's home in Hampstead, London. Finally they hit upon the notion of a parallel secondary plot: "Suppose we had a modern relationship that started in bed and went from there?" Fowles' narrative would be stripped and varnished to Pinter's specifications; and a modern story would be interpolated, describing the affair of the actors playing Charles and Sarah in a film adaptation of The French Lieutenant's Woman. Says Reisz: "The novel is a science fiction--a Victorian story and a modern speculation about fiction. Take away that acknowledgment of the 20th century, and the story doesn't add up. Our sense of Sarah's sexual awareness is a modern thing; inside her head, during the story, she jumps from the 19th to the 20th century." By the end of 1979, Pinter had completed his weaving of two centuries, two stories--and Reisz had found his heroine. The following May, Meryl Streep walked onto the Lyme Regis set, and the filming of The French Lieutenant's Woman began at last.

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."

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 . . .

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.

And then, in the final modern scene, Mike's film world falls to pieces. This is the Pinter-Reisz equivalent of Fowles' unhappy ending: a "wrap party" to celebrate the film's completion. Mike cannot bear the prospect of losing Anna. Where can she be? She is in the room where the final period sequence was shot, examining herself in one of Sarah's mirrors. But Anna engages in no searching of soul or image--just a glance and a primp and she's off. Mike reaches the room as the car motor's rev signals Anna's departure. He calls out for her: "Sarah!" It is too late. Mike, the modern man, has lost his French lieutenant's woman. Charles, the Victorian aesthete, has been deserted by a surpassing actress. A heart is broken, the mirror has cracked, the film spins off its real.

It was John Fowles who suggested that the film's final line of dialogue be "Sarah!" He deserves to share credit with Pinter and Reisz for assembling this multilayered meditation on the blurring lines that connect actor, character and audience. But the creation might have remained stillborn without the contribution of Meryl Streep. This Sarah, this Anna, this warring family of sirens demands an incandescent star. With this performance, Streep proves she is both. Virgin, whore, woman, actress, she provides the happy ending to The French Lieutenant's Woman and new life to a cinema starved for shining stars.

--By Richard Corliss. Reported by Arthur White/Lyme Regis

With reporting by Arthur White/Lyme Regis

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