Word: anna
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mind. What if this French Lieutenant is designed to do more than just tell two stories? What if it means to be a demonstration of actors' alchemy, not just into the identities of the characters they play, but into artists? Early in the film, Mike and Anna are rehearsing a scene that takes place in the woods: Sarah slips and falls into Charles' arms. The first run-through is perfunctory. Anna says, "Let's just do it again, O.K.?" She walks back to her mark, turns his way, catches his eye-and this time there...
Sarah falls in this scene, but she lands with an indecorous thud and giggles nervously, as the modern Anna might. Charles is hitting his emotional keys too hard: he sputters and foams out of control. There is not even a mention of their child, no real explanation for Sarah's disappearance. The moment when the lovers finally embrace-the climax awaited by every reader of the novel, anticipated by every new viewer of the film-seems ruinously flat...
...film has raised. For this sequence is neither period nor modern, neither the Fowles story nor the framing story, but a third dramatic level. Look at it this way: the viewer is in the screening room of Mike's fevered imagination. This is Mike playing Charles, and Anna playing Sarah. But the film has followed Mike's obsession to the point where he can no longer distinguish between the two. Mike has become not only the on-screen lover, but the off-screen lover and the film maker as well, and this French Lieutenant's Woman...
...then, in the final modern scene, Mike's film world falls to pieces. This is the Pinter-Reisz equivalent of Fowles' unhappy ending: a "wrap party" to celebrate the film's completion. Mike cannot bear the prospect of losing Anna. Where can she be? She is in the room where the final period sequence was shot, examining herself in one of Sarah's mirrors. But Anna engages in no searching of soul or image-just a glance and a primp and she's off. Mike reaches the room as the car motor...
...film's final line of dialogue be "Sarah!" He deserves to share credit with Pinter and Reisz for assembling this multilayered meditation on the blurring lines that connect actor, character and audience. But the creation might have remained stillborn without the contribution of Meryl Streep. This Sarah, this Anna, this warring family of sirens demands an incandescent star. With this performance, Streep proves she is both. Virgin, whore, woman, actress, she provides the happy ending to The French Lieutenant's Woman and new life to a cinema starved for shining stars...