"The French Lieutenant's Woman" was another of those books everyone said could never be filmed. John Fowles wrote it, both as a Victorian melodrama and as a 20th century comment on such melodramas and he gave it alternative endings, one 'happy' and the other 'unhappy'. How could any filmmaker film this and make it feel original? The novel idea that Karl Reisz and screen-writer Harold Pinter came up with was to do a reasonably straightforward film of the Victorian novel in the style of any period drama but to intersperse it with scenes of the actors playing the characters in a modern story in which they are shooting the film of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and just as there is an illict love story between Charles and Sarah Woodruff, the French Lieutenant's Whore as she refers to herself, so too there is an illict love story between Mike and Anna, the actors who play them and in these roles both Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep are superb, even if Streep's put-on English accent is ripe for parody.
When the film was released it met with very mixed reviews. Some people felt it failed miserably in its cross-cutting while others thought it was something of a masterpiece. Neither view is entirely accurate. The Victorian scenes are indeed terrific, not just in how they are played but in their design and in the way they are shot by Freddie Francis while the contemporary scenes do feel out of place with the parallels to the Victorian story made much too obvious but at least this gives Reisz and Pinter their chance to give us both endings. It's not the greatest adaptation of a book but it never ceases to be fascinating all the way up to those alternative endings.
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