Word: pinter
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...sardonic wit of the book's modern narrator, the novel envied the hidden passions underlying the Jane Austen world of garden parties and social proprieties. The contrast of Pinter's parallel stories preserves that envy, for the 19th-century drama features powerfully driven characters whose passions are strong enough to shred apart their lives. The story of the 20th century, on the other hand, concerns the off-hand affair between the two leads, Anna and Mike, during the shooting of the film--a cheap and superficial encounter. The present world is too comfortable, the emotions somehow counterfeit...
...Pinter lays suitably simple stagings across this background--frameworks for passion and its absence that play off one another. Most attention falls on the Victorian drama, in which Christopher Irons plays an aristocratic dabbler at science, Charles Smithson, whose plans for marriage are torn apart by his vision of the haunting face of Meryl Streep at the end of a long sea wall, wind and waves crashing about her. Smithson spends the rest of the film trying to understand the reason for her remarkable, extraordinary look...
...woman" (and sometimes "the French lieutenant's whore") because she is said to have dallied with a visiting French officer--a scandalous reputation she encourages. Charles and Sarah fall into a curious kind of love. Their story is not merely a romance, but Romantic in the grand style. Pinter's second story shows Irons and Streep playing Mike and Anna, the two 20th-century leads having a back-stage affair...
Streep's only rival in the film is its own structure. The Fowles-Pinter-Reisz creation is open film-making, with no secrets from the audience. You know the pattern from the first scene, when the actress crosses the set and becomes the character. The only problem with Pinter's structure is that you're never quite sure whether its form follows its function, or vice-versa. At times the two stories seem to have been contrived just to play off one another. The juxtaposition adds richness, though, if perhaps too few insights aside from biting reminders of our 20th...
While in many ways Streep is perfect for her character, she seems less than ideal for the film. The French Lieutenant's Woman becomes a contest between Streep's soulfulness and Pinter's stylistics. The contrast is fascinating, but the two sides pull against one another--an intrinsic flaw that limits the movie's reach and ultimately holds it back from greatness...