|
Less an adaptation of the novel than an imagistic commentary on it, "a pictorial record of the facts" if you will. D.H. Lawrence supplies Ken Russell with a mighty anchor for his own themes, the male and the female of the species in a crisis resolved by nature. The bold sculptress (Glenda Jackson) and her schoolmarm sister (Jennie Linden), the mining scion (Oliver Reed) and his free-thinking chum (Alan Bates), a carnal hydra. The Modern Woman ca. 1920, she confronts bovine masses with interpretative pirouettes and ventures into the soot-covered demimonde, "I want to drown in flesh." Her mate understands control more than affection and suffers from it, the fullness of living is on everybody's mind. "I think we've all gone mad!" "Pity we aren't madder!" Quite a head of steam Russell works up on his Romantic seekers and baroque metaphors, the camera lays on its side so that inflamed torsos can meet in a horizontal embrace. Rapid impressions make for a brazen swirl, a bloodied hand on white bark, the blasting sun eclipsed by Jackson's profile, a cackling funeral memory jabbing a bout of lovemaking. Partie de campagne, it leads to twined bodies in the mud of a drained lake. "Remnants of the old expressions" in England, now a pastoral field, now a rubbish heap. Nude wrestling, a gentlemanly art before a burnished fireplace, it suits the would-be libertine who adores the world but hates humanity. "Try to love me a little more, want me a little less" (cf. Roeg's Bad Timing). A rehearsal for The Music Lovers with the queer aesthete at the Alpine chalet (Vladek Sheybal), a gelid void for the wounded elephant of masculinity. "It's bound to be possibly undesirable, but still an experience of some sort." Two decades later, The Rainbow contemplates the calm before the storm. Cinematography by Billy Williams. With Eleanor Bron, Alan Webb, Catherine Willmer, Sharon Gurney, Christopher Gable, Phoebe Nicholls, and Michael Gough.
--- Fernando F. Croce |