Watch The French Lieutenant's Woman For Free

Sadly Over-hyped

Good movie but grossly overrated

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A film is being made of a story, set in 19th century England, about Charles (Jeremy Irons), a biologist who is engaged to be married, but who falls in love with outcast Sarah (Meryl Streep), whose melancholy makes her leave him after a short, but passionate affair.I did not think this would be my kind of movie. A period piece romance with Meryl Streep? Sounds pretty boring. But instead, we get this really interesting movie-in-movie, where the action we see as real can be cut away from at any time. And then this also allows us two stories in one, which have more than a few parallels.Streep is obviously a gifted actress and the best of her generation. Irons is great, as well, though not nearly as recognized. He makes all that he touches turn to gold.

If you like Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and novelists of that ilk, you ought to get a bang out of this story of Jeremy Irons sacrificing his self esteem for love of a woman whom he loses for the flimsiest of reasons.The story in the main has Irons and Meryl Streep back in Victorian England. She is "the French lieutenant's woman" and is shunned by the village for having had an affair with the married man. She now moons over her absent lover and waits for the return that will never be realized.Irons is an independently wealthy naturalist who visits the village in search of fossils and finds love for the darkly mysterious Streep, although Irons himself has just married into a family of some repute. He divorces his wife -- shocking! -- and gives up his status as an "honorable gentleman." He gives Streep money, and later follows her to London, loses her, finds her three years later, and she rejects him because she has now become a liberated woman.There is a parallel story that doesn't get much time. It takes place today. Irons and Streep, both married, are having a fling during the shooting of a film. Again, Irons falls in love, but for Streep the encounter was far more casual and despite his efforts, she takes off happily with her French husband.The only Fowles novel I've read is "The Magus", which follows a similar trajectory -- man is coerced into a woman's thrall and is then deliberately and openly betrayed by her. The traditional Madia Gond, a tribe in India, had a custom called the ghotul in which adolescent boys and girls lived in the same house and played musical beds each night, whether they wanted to or not. The elders of the tribe claimed that this practice was intended to "cure them of love." I begin to wonder if Fowles isn't on the same trip. You know, "Most friendship is feigning; most loving mere folly"? Jeremy Irons as the uptight Victorian naturalist manqué never steps wrong. He ALWAYS never steps wrong. Meryl Streep. If you've seen her in later character roles like "The Iron Lady", you may not remember how lovely, pale, and fragile she could be in her earlier films. She's a splendid actress, even though make up has given her a mop of dark reddish hair so massive that it may have its own time zones. And both of the actors are perfectly capable of overcoming the sometimes stilted dialog: "I have taken unpardonable advantage of your condition. Forgive me." There are some allusions to Darwin but I don't think they amount to very much.It was directed by Karel Reisz. He directed the colossal art house flop called "Weeds," which was saved from complete obscurity only by my own stellar performance as an extra. Boy, did I establish atmosphere, or what? A prisoner smoking with a cigarette holder, a masterful touch! Here, whatever else we may say about the film, Reisz and his photographer, Freddie Francis, have paid such close attention to composition, values, rich colors, and camera placement that every shot is almost a painting in itself.I'm compelled to recommend it, although I wish the endings had been different and at least ONE of the Ironses finally wound up with one of the Streeps, but no dice. It's a story of lost loves, along the lines of "Wuthering Heights", but I wasn't bored for a moment.

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.

This film is a joy to watch -- as not many films these days are. The settings are superbly created -- the green, grotto-like woodland where Irons and Streep meet in the Victorian world of the film, the murky streets of Lyme, Exeter, and London, and the interior of the lawyer's office, for example. The Victorian part of the film emerges from the dawning of the concept of abnormal psychology (just before Freud) and is really convincing. Streep shows us that her character cannot move on emotionally until she has worked out her own madness. That constitutes a remarkable and complex performance of insanity and self-awareness inhabiting a single psyche. She earns the gentle movement out of the tunnel and onto the calm lake. The turbulence of the unconscious -- that threatening sea of which Irons has warned her -- has been subdued. Seems to me the flaw lies in the 'modern story' (as some here have pointed out). It may be that the Streep character is trying to find a subtext for her fictional heroine, but it looks like the old ennui, so that, while her lack of concern for the relationship is understandable, his obsession with it is not. Though the garden party at the end almost gets it there. Were we shown her decision there? If so, I missed it. I like the concept of the 'two endings' and their contrast, but the ending in the 20th century was a so what? The one in the 19th century was complex and included much of the pain that the relationship had caused both characters. A little more attention to the contemporary love affair -- to suggest that it was more than just a romp on location -- would have helped that dimension of the film per se and also suggested what the Victorian lovers had earned within their Hardyesque world.