Charles answers, mumbling, half awake, “Yes?. A telephone rings (hence we are in the modern age). For a moment we cannot tell who they are. A man and a woman are asleep in bed, apparently nude under the covers.
EMPIRE OF SIN LIEUTENANT WINDOWS
“I would allow it.” Soon the viewpoint shifts and we are seeing the scene from outside the glass windows with Sam, Charles’s servant, and Tina’s maid Mary. “Yes, Charles,” says Tina, still demure, still toying. “It has not escaped my notice.” Elaborately, formally, Charles asks for her hand, or, rather, asks if Tina would allow him to ask her father for her hand. “No, Charles,” answers Tina, demure but with a toying note, as if she knows she holds the bottom card. “It cannot have escaped your notice, my dear Tina, that it is fully six weeks since I came down here to Lyme from London,” he begins. “Yes, my pink! I’ll wear that!” Before long she is receiving Charles in a kind of winter garden. “You look pretty as a picture in your pink.” “My pink!” exclaims Ernestina. “Your pink is so lovely, Miss,” says Mary. “Oh, what dress shall I wear, Mary?” she asks her maid, her eyes dancing with excitement. Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons), has just arrived. In our first fully developed scene, we see a spun-sugar little Victorian heiress, Ernestina (Lynsey Baxter), in a luxurious family summer home, being told that her handsome suitor, Mr. It is a jewel of a seaside town: cobblestones, old gas lights, old store fronts, steep streets that plunge straight down to the docks, and square-rigged ships and old cannon, recalling Drake and Hawkins, for it was seamen from Devon who sailed forth in the time of the first Elizabeth to battle the Spanish Armada. Yet we do not proceed directly to the scene played by Meryl Streep but, under the credits, wander through Lyme Regis in 1867.
EMPIRE OF SIN LIEUTENANT MOVIE
So this is a movie about people making a movie. Meryl Streep nods and starts to rise and a man with a clapperboard cries, “Shot 32. Before the credits roll, we see an actress in period costume (Meryl Streep) sitting at the foot of a great stone jetty which juts out into the sea. The scene is mid-19th-century Lyme Regis, a beautiful, small resort town in Devon on the English Channel. A rather heterogeneous group, you will say. These days it is often the star of a movie who has the final word on the shooting script, but in The French Lieutenant’s Woman Meryl Streep, said to be highly contentious, was mixing it up with some formidable figures. Kramer to give “the woman’s point of view,” and her success was such as to send millions of women out of the film with a virtuous glow. She is known to have extensively rewritten her own final courtroom speech in Kramer vs. Meryl Streep, on the other hand, is a proclaimed feminist. Over much of Pinter’s work there hangs a faint whiff of misogyny, although this is perhaps only an aspect of his rather dark view of human character in general. Fowles’s first novel, The Collector, in fact, is about an English football-pool winner who uses his newfound wealth and leisure to abduct an attractive woman, tie her up in a secluded place, and keep her tied up for much of the book-not exactly a fantasy of your average ERA supporter. Neither John Fowles nor Harold Pinter has up to this point been known as an ardent feminist. So this new movie is positively bristling with prestige credits. And Harold Pinter, author of the screenplay of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, is Harold Pinter.
Bonuses were cover stories in both Newsweek (“A Star for the 80’s”) and now Time (“Magic Meryl”). Kramer, 1980’s second-biggest box-office success, for which she won an Academy Award. The darling of critics since her years at the Yale Drama School and a sparkling season or so on the New York stage, she got off to a fast start in the movies in Michael Cimino’s The Deerhunter (assisted by a leading role in television’s Holocaust), and three films later co-starred with Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Meryl Streep has attained an even more luminous position among this country’s film actresses. John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman has won that most enviable combination for an ambitious novel: serious esteem from critics and over a year on the New York Times best-seller list. His Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Morgan are considered central works in the 60’s renaissance of British cinema. Karel Reisz, an anglicized Czechoslovak, is one of the world’s most accomplished film directors.
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