Nearly an entire century ago, the United States banned . In fact, every intimate detail is touched with residue from Jane Campion’s sensual delight, from sex in the forest that leaves Connie’s back spotted with dirt to rainwater-soaked clothing after the couple leap onto each other in the rain. When Oliver brushes his fingertips against Connie’s smooth back, the attraction is palpable—it’s as if you, too, feel a lover’s hand running down your spine.
Much of this allure is thanks to the film’s director, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, the perfect fit to helm an adaptation of a novel as titillating as this one. Clermont-Tonnerre—who chronicled the profound relationship between an incarcerated man and his horse in her directorial debut, The Mustang—realizes the gravity of the connection between two souls. With her delicate touch, Lady Chatterley’s Lover transcends being some run-of-the-mill horny Netflix movie. The adaptation is a moving ode to love and the lengths we’ll go to keep a blaze burning.
The romance between Connie and Oliver is the key base supporting all of the other sexual elements of the film. The plot isn’t on the fringes, here, pushed aside to move sex scenes to the front. Our love story takes center stage, with the intimate sequences leveling up the connection between the two leads. There has been discourse surrounding the question of “Are sex scenes really necessary?”, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover gives us a firm answer: Yes. Not only do we need them, we deserve sex scenes like the vibrant, intense ones that this film provides.
The 2022 adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover should, in fact, be banned from America just as well. How—after seeing two young lovers pine over each other in a quaint cottage, beside a fireplace, or on a sunny hillside—are we meant to return to the real world? Is there any way that us 21st Century folk can abandon our phones, our metropolitan lifestyles, and our dating apps, so that we, too, can experience a swirling romance in the sprawling English countryside, prancing around naked in the rain while avoiding all commitments. Alas, it’s far too easy to get swept up in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Ban it now, before I watch it 40 times over!
