The French Lieutenant's Mistress (film)

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Movie
German title The mistress of the French lieutenant
Original title The French Lieutenant's Woman
Country of production GB
original language English
Publishing year 1981
length 119 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Karel Reisz
script Harold Pinter
production Leon Clore
music Carl Davis
camera Freddie Francis
cut John Bloom
occupation

The French Lieutenant's Woman ( The French Lieutenant's Woman ) is a British film drama by Karel Reisz from the year 1981 . The screenplay by Harold Pinter is based on the novel of the same name by John Fowles .

action

The action takes place in 19th century England. The biologist Charles Henry Smithson is engaged to a woman from a wealthy family. Smithson falls in love with Sarah Woodruff, who previously had a relationship with a French officer, which is why she is not respected in her place.

The pair of lovers is currently played in a film by Anna and Mike, who are also linked by an affair. In one of the conversations, Mike mentions that the novel has two degrees: one maintains the relationship between the lovers and the other ends. The filmmakers would have opted for the happy ending.

Smithson reveals to his fiancée Ernestina that he cannot marry her. Angry, she threatens her influential father will take revenge on Smithson. The latter signs a declaration in which he takes the responsibility for breaking the engagement on himself. Smithson confirmed in the statement that he was no longer a man of honor.

Woodruff goes into hiding and Smithson hires a private investigator to find her. She didn't reply to a newspaper advertisement until three years later. Smithson accuses her of ruining his life, then forgives her. He and Woodruff are back together.

Anna and Mike's relationship is falling apart.

Challenges of adapting a novel

In his 1969 novel, which was the basis of the film adaptation, John Fowles tells a superficially conventional love story in Victorian England in the 19th century. The 32-year-old Charles Smithson, likely heir to a nobility title, is engaged to Ernestina Freeman, the handsome daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant, but at the same time feels drawn to the social outsider Sarah Woodruff, who is said to have been the mistress of a French lieutenant. A pair of lovers, whose story takes place in the second half of the 20th century, does not appear in the novel. The charm of the novel, which was an international bestseller and at the same time highly praised by critics, lies in its metafictional breaks and its intertextual references as well as a narrative style that repeatedly breaks through the plot ironically by adopting a post-date standpoint. However, this effect is achieved solely with linguistic means. In addition, Fowles offers his reader three different endings for the novel.

John Frankenheimer wrote about the film:

“There is no way to film this novel. You can tell the same story in a film, but of course not in the same way. And how Fowles tells his story is exactly what makes the novel so good. "

In fact, Fowles and his publisher Tom Maschler were already thinking about its film adaptation before the novel was published and asked Karl Reisz if he would be willing to direct it. Reisz turned it down, however, because he had just made a very demanding film, Isadora , a film about Isadora Duncan . In the end, it took 12 years for it to be made into a film. Fowles considered a number of screenwriters and directors, who then dropped out for various reasons. Even when Reisz finally agreed to direct in 1978, difficulties arose again. Warner Brothers , who originally wanted to provide funding for the film, dropped out of the project in mid-January 1980, four months before shooting began. To them, the funds they needed didn't seem proportionate to the expected box office success. Ultimately, Meryl Streep's agent arranged for United Artists to fund the film project.

Fowles himself was not ready to act as a screenwriter. He had written the screenplay for the film adaptation of his novel The Magus , which was directed by Guy Green. The film adaptation failed despite the star cast due to the complexity of the novel, which Fowles could not implement cinematically. Michael Caine , who starred alongside Anthony Quinn and Candice Bergen , said this was the worst movie he'd ever starred in because no one understood what it was about. The film became notorious because of a quote from Woody Allen : "If I could live my life again, I would do everything the same again, with the exception that I wouldn't watch 'The Magus' again." Fowles and its publisher Maschler were able to convince Harold Pinter to write the script.

Pinter, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, was already known and successful as a theater writer in the early 1980s. Due to his theater work, he was used to reducing complex content to the essentials without losing anything of the content. Fowles himself emphasized in an essay The Filming of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" , in which he commented on the adaptation of his novel, the unusual trust that he had gained in the course of the collaboration with Pinter. Roger Ebert writes in his review of the film that Pinter and Reisz managed to achieve a simple and brilliant implementation at the same time. They completely ignored the specific narrative style of Fowle's novel and used a cinematic approach that also created an ironic break from the Victorian love story. Instead of the ironically commented narrator that Fowles used, they used a love story set in the present day, which - not least because it used the same actors - similarly created an ironic distance from the conventional Victorian love story. In this way, Pinter imitated the postmodern narrative style and its mega-fictional breaks, which were decisive for the success of the novel. It also allowed Pinter to take advantage of the novel's ambiguous ending. In the film, Charles and Sarah are reunited, but in the current love story, Anna leaves Mike standing during the party that celebrates the end of the shoot.

Reviews

Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that the film adaptation, directed by Karel Reisz, was just as "simple" as "brilliant". Its visual side is " beautiful "; the roles are "well-acted" ("remarkably well-acted").

Awards

Meryl Streep for Best Actress , the script, the sets, the costumes and the editing were nominated for an Oscar in 1982 . Meryl Streep won the Golden Globe Award in 1982 , and the screenplay and film for Best Drama were nominated for a Golden Globe Award.

Meryl Streep, Carl Davis for the music and sound experts won the BAFTA Award in 1982 . The eight nominations for the BAFTA Award included those for Jeremy Irons, Karel Reisz, and Best Picture . Karel Reisz won the Evening Standard British Film Award in 1982 and the Bodil Award and was nominated for the César in 1983 .

Meryl Streep won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award in 1981 . Harold Pinter won the Premi David di Donatello in 1982 . Carl Davis was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1983 for the soundtrack album .

background

The film grossed approximately $ 22.6 million in US cinemas .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Josua Novak: The Postmodern Comical Novel. Tectum Verlag, Heidelberg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8288-9859-2 , p. 27 and p. 28.
  2. ↑ Quoted from a review by Roger Ebert . The original quote is: “There is no way you can film the book. You can tell the same story in a movie, of course, but not in the same way. And how Fowles tells his story is what makes the book so good. "
  3. ^ William Stephenson: Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman. Continuum, London 2007, ISBN 978-0-8264-9009-4 , p. 94.
  4. ^ A b William Stephenson: Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman. Continuum, London 2007, ISBN 978-0-8264-9009-4 , p. 95.
  5. ↑ The highs and lows of being John Fowles. (No longer available online.) Guardian.co.uk, archived from the original on March 6, 2010 ; Retrieved March 6, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.guardian.co.uk
  6. ↑ a b review by Roger Ebert
  7. ^ Box office / business for The French Lieutenant's Woman

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