The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981)

Sorry, this movie sucks

Awesome Movie

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

I think the film shows us how difficult it is for people to achieve true love, regardless of the age they live in. Although it might seem that today there is less direct pressure from society, but there are other different reasons to make people stay in the status quo, convenience can be very powerful too. In the very beginning of the film Anne watches herself (Sarah) in the mirror, which in one hand is the beginning of Ana's, the actress's transformation into Sarah, and in my eyes it is also a nice allegory of how the two parallel stories in the film reflect on each other. They are in fact more or less the same, except from the ending. In the film Ana and Mike are acting in, Sarah and Charles end up together, but Ana and Mike don't stay together. For me the overall message of the film was, that romantic love only triumphs in tales, in a romanticized world, but not in reality. I liked the contrasting cinematic styles of the two story lines, the acting was great, and also liked the different endings. For me the main flaw was that the "present" story-line felt very much overpowered by the Victorian story-line, it felt it was less important, and we also didn't get to know too much about Ana and Charles. Even if portraying the two relationships in an equally significant way would have been very very difficult in two hours, but I think it would have served the theme of the film better. Plus because I don't believe in love at first sight, it's always hard for me to believe that two characters can fall deeply in love with each other as fast as Sarah and Charles did.

This is one of those movies where you suspect that someone is trying to make a profound point, but you feel like a dummy because you just cannot figure out what it is. The best I could come up with is that love is just as nerve-wracking today as it was in the nineteenth century, only today men don't have to worry about being sued for breach of promise, and women don't have to worry about being ruined for life. So I guess we can call that progress. There is a ludicrous scene in which Irons finally gets to have sex with Streep (in the nineteenth century), and he spends more time taking off his clothes than he does having sex with her. So that is another difference: in the nineteenth century, people wore more clothes and had less foreplay.

I am going to the top end of a 5 here. This film had a big reputation when it was 1981 but almost all the quality here is Meryl Steep in her first role, and first Academy Award.Some great sites were used and the filmography has an experts look to the eye. It has a great score. The problems- it is too long and the story turns into a mush mash of themes once you get past the early reels.There is not enough romance scenes with Meryl Streep either and at an age where any guy would climb all over this one unless he was spade or neutered. For Streep, she earns 4 out of the 5 rating out of 10 I give it.

Thirty years after seeing it for the first time, I revisited this film last night on PBS. I had remembered only two things from it: The quality of Meryl Streep's acting and the famous scene of her standing on the very edge of a stone wave breaker while the sea burst around her. I had forgotten that it was a film within a film. I had forgotten all but the vaguest outlines of the plot. I had entirely forgotten Jeremy Irons. If retention in memory is the hallmark of a good work of art, I'd have to give "The French Lieutenant's Woman" a low mark.And yet the second viewing of the film was a revelation. I hadn't previously been struck by how beautiful Meryl Streep was when she was young. Nor did I remember how controlled her acting was in this overwrought movie. "The French Lieutenant's Woman" was nominated for five Academy Awards and deservedly lost all five, including Ms. Streep's nomination as best actress. Nevertheless, this was one of the record number of nominations she has compiled and it should be seen if only for that reason. It adds a different dimension to her incomparable portfolio of challenging roles. Jeremy Irons fares less well in my estimation. Like Ms. Streep, he plays two parts, one as her co-star in the film being made and the other as the lover ruined by his all-consuming love for her film character. Not that Irons does a bad job of acting. He simply fails to be convincing in the second of his two roles. That may be because the story (or the part) is inherently unconvincing, sort of Wuthering Heights without the emotional tide which causes that heavy- breathing romance to seem plausible to many women if not to their menfolk.It's still not a great movie. Maybe not even a good movie. But if all we ever cared to watch were good/great films, Hollywood would soon be out of business.