Oscar Wilde once said that “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” In the case of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Netflix's adap of D.H. Lawrence's controversial classic, that statement takes on a new meaning. As Emma Corrin, Lady Chatterley herself, tells Total Film, the sex on screen is not about power dynamics but, “power for oneself and being empowered by it.”
Telling the tale of a lonely aristocrat falling in love with the groundsman on her husband's estate and their voyage of sexual discovery, Lawrence's 1928 tale of carnal desire was banned in the UK after its publisher, Penguin, was brought to trial under the Obscene Publications Act. After a dramatic and much-publicised case, the book was made available to the public in 1960, and bookshops across the land struggled to keep it in stock. Even all these years later, depictions of sexual awakening, class divide and romance have scarcely lost their ability to inflame, with images released of Jack O'Connell and Corrin whipping social media into a frenzy. “It's still something that people are struggling to talk about,” reflects Corrin. “I'm not surprised a hundred years since the book was published people see the poster and react so strongly to nudity and sex being portrayed organically.”
Of course, this has not been the first time the novel has been adapted – over a dozen versions have appeared on stage and screen, most notably by Ken Russell for the BBC in 1993, with Joely Richardson director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, the reason that Richardson, and audiences, return to the story is due to its ever-green humanity. Those timeless themes seemed particularly important to revisit in the 21st century.
