A Worthy Life

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE RAINBOW Directed by Ken Russell; Screenplay by Ken and Vivian Russell

There is a time in every young reader's life when the works of D.H. Lawrence strike with the force of revelation. His novels can leave you transformed (at least temporarily) by his visionary social criticism and his earnest reflections on the endless struggle for a transfiguring sexuality. Ken Russell's adaptation of The Rainbow is faithful not only to Lawrence's spirit but also to the naive idealism he was (one hopes still is) capable of animating in eager, youthful hearts.

The Rainbow is a coming-of-age story set in turn-of-the-century Britain, when the modern world was also coming of age. In its first sequence, little & Ursula Brangwen (who will grow up to be played by an intense Sammi Davis) races dangerously close to the water, reaching out for the title symbol. As she leaves home in the final sequence, another rainbow arches above her, beckoning her onward. In between, she experiments with lesbian and heterosexual lovers (Amanda Donohoe and Paul McGann, respectively), endures a bleak passage as a teacher in a working-class school and witnesses the end of an Edenesque England. All these experiences test her, stir her questing spirit and lead her finally to feminist independence, which was never more attractively stated than it was in these early, innocent days.

Certainly the challenge of recapturing that spirit on film seems to have tranquilized Russell. His imagery is more confident, less feverish, but no less potent than it has been in years. Perhaps that is because it is once again enlisted in the service of a story worth telling, ideas worth thinking about and a life worth caring about.