Epilogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
‘Give me a body then’: this is the formula of philosophical reversal. The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which has to be overcome to reach thinking … It is through the body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with thought.
(Deleuze 1989: 189)Lady Chatterley passes the gate and her silhouette is literally absorbed into the richly patterned surroundings of the forest. As she crosses the wooded expanse that separates her husband's house from her lover's lodge, the film chronicles, with the meticulousness and unpredictability of a devoted but disorderly botanist, the bristling, teeming life of the nature that beckons her.
Lady Chatterley, Pascale Ferran's latest opus, is a sensory feast, a work in which cinema's sensual, haptic and synaesthetic powers of evocation are explored to the full so as to invoke ‘Desire's variable plane of immanence, as Deleuze theorised it’ (Burdeau 2006: 8-9).1 Yet her film is also a ‘costume drama’ and a literary adaptation. Does this mean that Ferran's project boils down to the naïve and nostalgic account of a relationship between man and nature that is only possible if imagined in the past tense? Not quite. The story of Lady Chatterley's sensual awakening unfolds against a backdrop of war destruction as well as class and gender divides that have maimed and reduced minds and bodies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cinema and SensationFrench Film and the Art of Transgression, pp. 177 - 178Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007