Word: reisz
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Directed by Karel Reisz; Screenplay by Harold Pinter...
...slap of a clapper board indicates the start of a "take," and of this film. Few will note that the names on the slate are fictitious, not those of Reisz and his cinematographer Freddie Francis; but it is the first hint of the life-to-be outside the walls of the period story. The audience will learn soon and often enough: 14 times, the "present" film-within-the-film will give way to the "past" film-within-the-film-within-the-film. Inside the deepest box it is 1867, and Charles Smithson is again living out his perplexed obsession with...
...first major film role, Jeremy Irons must carry both stories and the audience with him; he must lay the tracks that lead Charles and Mike to their fateful folly. Says Karel Reisz: "Jeremy has the authority of a leading man without the narcissism that so often goes with it." Indeed, there is something of the fervid adolescent in his playing of these serious young men. It takes doomed love to test, toughen and mature Charles-and a compelling actor-personality to play him. Irons is equally persuasive as performer and fond lover. As Reisz notes, "Jeremy does have his Heathcliff...
...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...
...John Fowles who suggested that the 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...