Quiet yet beautiful – and there’s plenty of sex: Lady Chatterley’s Lover reviewed

If you’re of my generation, I expect your first encounter with D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the (well-thumbed) book passed around school and then maybe Ken Russell’s full-frontal, hut-shaking, 1993 television adaptation starring Joely Richardson and Sean Bean at his most Sean Bean. (‘I wan’ yer, m’lady.’) But this Netflix version doesn’t play it as high-toned smut or as a pop-culture joke. It’s more in keeping with Lawrence’s alternative title for the novel, Tenderness, and it’s more a gentle, affecting, immersive love story than a sex story although there is plenty of sex in it. You’re not about to be short-changed there, m’lady.

The film is directed by Laure de Cleremont-Tonnerre (The Mustang) and stars Emma Corrin as Constance. Corrin first made a splash as Princess Diana in The Crown and she isn’t obvious casting, but she’s wonderful. She luminously embodies Connie’s intelligence, loneliness, craving for love. You can’t take your eyes off her, which is fortunate because in this adaptation she does have to carry the film.

We initially follow the early days of her marriage to Sir Clifford Chatterley (Matthew Duckett), a minor aristo whose vast country estate has been built on the back of exploited miners. But she hasn’t thought about any of that yet. After their perfunctory wedding night, he leaves to fight on the front and when he returns home it’s in a wheelchair as he’s paralysed from the waist down. Alas, he doesn’t suddenly detect stirrings and implausibly recover like Matthew Crawley from Downton. (D.H. Lawrence is no Julian Fellowes, is he?) Connie tries to be a kind and solicitous wife but discovers that he doesn’t have much going for him from the neck up either as he’s sadly limited and can be cruel.

Eventually, his old childhood nanny is rehired to look after him.