Word: viewer
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...viewer finds himself watching Meryl Streep much more closely than he is accustomed to watching actresses. More seems to be going on. It is not simply that she manages to make her face an astonishingly clear reflection of her character's complexities. It is not merely that this pale face, with its small, amused eyes and its nose long and curved as a flensing knife (when she kissed Alan Alda injudiciously in Tynan, this precarious nose displaced the flesh of his cheek up toward his eyeball), is poised fascinatingly between beauty and harshness. What makes the viewer sit forward...
...suspicion begins to form in the viewer's 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...
...that Sarah has been caring for the child conceived in their one night of consummation. But in the film, everything seems slightly "off." The lighting, which in the earlier period scenes was dense and murky, is here bright and unrelenting. The camera stands back too far to encourage the viewer's involvement in an intimate scene. The acting is oddly strident and ragged, as if a failed first take had somehow made it into the final...
...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...
...wait. Those who find it so may have been seduced by the expectations the 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...