To me, this movie is perfection.

As Good As It Gets

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I was expecting to see torrid love scenes but instead it was crude poking and then i discovered it was all about class snobbery and jealously ... i finally capitulated and turned it off .... if you really think a woman wants to be treated like this then it won't be your cup of tea either

Lady Chatterley's Lover is understandably controversial but it is also a compelling read, though not a personal favourite. This film is not exactly terrible as there are some good things to see on display but the maligning it has gotten is as understandable as the book being controversial. The photography mostly has a nostalgic quality to it while the costumes and sets are exquisite in colour and detail. The score is seductive and hauntingly beautiful, Sylvia Kristel is a real beauty, the second half is an improvement over the first half with some appropriately steamy moments and Nicholas Clay as well as being astonishingly handsome and sexy is quite good as Oliver. Unfortunately Kristel's acting talents do not translate here, throughout she is very wooden and bland, while on the other side of the scale Shane Briant's hammy over-acting grates after a while. The supporting cast, and there are some talented actors here, are unable to do much with characters that are written to caricatures(blander than that in some cases). Some of the sexy moments are sensual but too many and most of them verge on lowbrow and too much like a porn film, the book is an explicit one but it's not that trashed up. The script is very underwritten and banal, it is difficult to take seriously anything that the actors say, while the storytelling is really dull with non-existent passion in the first half, the main reason being that while the basic story of the book is intact, the prose, characterisations and passion(mostly) are barely scarce. Some of the editing looks hastily-put together too. All in all, Lady Chatterley's Lover looks good but it is dull and underwritten, and takes the sexual nature of the book to extremes, well at least to me it did. 4/10 Bethany Cox

D. H. Lawrence's tale of class distinctions and nature versus culture turned into soft porn, but pretty good soft porn as these things go.Sylvia Krystel is Constance Chatterly whose wealthy, titled husband, Shane Briant, returns to their vast estate from World War I only half a man, confined to a wheelchair, but cheerful enough about it. Krystel spends her time taking care of him until Briant brings in a tough-minded elderly nurse. This leaves Krystel out in the cold and terribly bored.Briant is insensitive to her needs but he does want an heir, a future baronet, and the couple more or less agree that she can take a lover who will impregnate her. So she does. But she picks the wrong guy.It takes no more than a glimpse of Mellors, Nicholas Clay, the caretaker, washing himself in the nude to put her in a lather and soon they're rolling around in the hay. Briant figures out that something is either up or in the offing and becomes petulant. Mellors is declasse. I mean, the man is some kind of GARDENER or something, always needing a shave, dirt under his fingernails. Not the proper father of a future baronet. He humiliates Mellors by ordering him around and making him undertake unpleasant tasks.Anyway, the wind up: Krystal becomes pregnant and runs away to Canada with the caretaker, while, under the tutelage of the nurse, Briant becomes strong enough to walk on crutches and the pair of them live happily together in their mansion.Lawrence's novel was something of a cause celebre when first published in the USA. All that sex. The movie has captured all that sex, including a notorious purple passage involving wildflowers and pubic hair. It's the equal of "the earth moved" as a description of orgasm in Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." It's quite a laugh getter today. I don't know exactly how realistic the sex scenes in the film are. One instance of simulated coitus involves Krystel sitting on the rough bark of a fallen elm, which I can't imagine to be anyone's idea of a good time.It's not a junky movie, though. The photography and the location shooting are well done, and a good deal of attention is paid to wardrobe and makeup. You won't find any fashion statement here, unlike the pastel splendor of Robert Redford's "The Great Gatsby." My God, these clothes are ugly here, right down to the underwear. People wrap themselves up like mummies. And Krystel doesn't wear dainty slippers like Daisy. She wears these ruddy great black shoes that lace halfway up the calves.I guess the director, Just Jaekin, is best known for other soft-core porn like "Emanuelle" and "The Story of O," but he's efficient enough here. Sylvia Krystel looks the part of the frustrated wife, though her voice is dubbed. Clay is bluntly masculine as the ithyphallic male. Maybe the best performance is given by Shane Briant as the crippled husband. He has strangely neotenous features, as if he'd never quite outgrown his infancy -- large eyes, prominent forehead, and generous lips, with an overall resemblance to a ventriloquist's dummy. Yet he's able to do wonders with those features. They're required to change in the course of the story from brave and resigned to bitter and superior -- and they do. His is the toughest role in the story and he carries it off pretty well.I couldn't remember all of the novel but I remember being impressed by Lawrence's sharp eye for detail, along the lines of John Updyke. Who, for instance, can better capture the crunch of gravel beneath shoes? With only one or two sentences Lawrence was able to project volumes of information about a place or person. The class distinctions that obsessed Lawrence and the people in his story were roughly the same as those that captivated F. Scott Fitzgerald in "The Great Gatsby." They don't mean as much to us today. (Or if they do, the worry is hidden away somewhere in the upper reaches of the status-sphere.) Of course we are still occasionally treated to scandals in which the teen-aged heiress runs off with the smooth-talking chauffeur.The theme of nature and culture runs through the story too. (Somebody call Claude Levi-Strauss, quick.) I particularly enjoyed the regional accents of the local nobodies, in which "up" becomes "oop". And those wildflowers -- some heavy duty symbolism there. And I suppose that Briant's going to war and being horribly wounded was a cultural act, while stringing wildflowers in your lover's pundendum was a natural one, but the fact is that all through the movie I kept thinking about how much Briant's character had sacrificed for his country, while Mellors was petting his doves in the gamekeeper's cottage. Life's not fair.

1981 VHS & 2005 DVD are based uponby British novelist D.H. Lawrence's last (1928). In it's time, "Lady Chatterley's Love" was (re)viewed as "sexually scandalous"; so much so, D.H. Lawrence suffered continuously due to charges of obscenity. Like the (1928) novel, the (2005) DVD contains direct depictions of different-gender adulterous sexual intercourse. Many 'obscene' (at least for 1928!) sexual words are part of Lawrence's novel & the screenplay. As a result, the novel upon which the movie is based wasn't fully published in Britain, though it had long been available in other countries.During the 2nd half of the 20th century, in 1960, Penguin books bought out the expurgated edition & was summarily prosecuted for violating the Obscene Publication Act of 1959! Even the trial was scandalous; though, the publishers prevailed & were acquitted. Their acquittal has been viewed by academic literary & cultural critics to this day as a catalyst for the new freedom of literature & artistic expression. Some critics have regarded Lawrence as the greatest British man novelist of the early 20th century (Virginia Woolf, the woman).On to the film: it is equal to the novel in its sexological study of a paralyzed Sir Clifford Chatterley, who strongly advises his wife, Lady Constance Chatterley, to find a lover for herself in order to satisfy what Sir Clifford cannot ever give her, or so he thought: sexual fulfillment. (That belief would seem quite naive now since a wide variety of sexually satisfying techniques do not require a man who is paralyzed to be fully functioning! What is sexual & what is sexual satisfaction & pleasure has measurably changed since 1928).Lady Constance Chatterley reluctantly takes her husband's advice, being quite young & beautiful. But, after beginning a very sexually intense affair with a proletariat man, Mellors, their butch & brawny country gamekeeper, Lady Chatterley's affair shocks her husband who suggested it & the high society in which they take part.It is definitely not a movie for children because the sexual content is steamy & blatant. By contemporary standards, it is still a story of a scandalous love affair with an interesting plot; but, certainly the movie is not pornographic or unusual ("Asylum" is somewhat similar, for example). It is as much a sexology of 1920's British social class mores as anything else. Because it is a period piece that does examine an era & the moral standards of a particular class of a society, it is a more than notorious for its history of scandal: "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is loaded with Lawrence's observations & remarks about the mixture of mores for British bourgeoisie society & its double standard for women's sexuality.