"I left the cinema very happy and with a feeling of a still lingering fear and intense joy that perhaps could come close to what you feel, still running but just having escaped unharmed after three hours of torture by a sadistic lunatic. The film was over. Following this sentiment of immense relief, there came anger. I know my Lawrence well and I have read all of his books, and my first encounters with Lady Chatterley's Lover (the book) was strong, so I had been looking forward to this adaptation. And here was the worst film I had seen for a long time. I was angry, because I couldn't find a single thing in this adaptation that would explain why I had had to pay for this. Nothing. Even the actors were mediocre (if they ever spoke!), our dear homme de bois, was actually at times quite laughable (the audience did laugh when they certainly weren't supposed to)."
SCAVALLIN
"D.H. Lawrence is iconoclastic and as such no one gets through his hands unscratched. No luck, no hope no future for the son of a miner, the wife of a miner or a miner himself because they will only know poverty and repression, including the repression of their passions that will have to become illegal and even criminal if necessary to step over social censorship. But no luck either for the boss of the mine or the aristocrat who has nothing to do except counting his bonds and shares because they are unable to feel and experience any emotion, passion, sentimental adventure. They are British to the core. No sex please. But the film gets rid of all that dark vision and transform one of the tenser and denser tale about social segregation in England into a love affair under the rain in the middle of woods. I have nothing against the importation of an English masterpiece into the French vision, but when the French vision is reduced to sentimentalese mishmash and melo-non-dramatic hogwash I regret to be living where I am living. The film is too long and often close to boring and it is not two or three scrutinizing shots of the man's sex by the voyeuristic camera that will make the drug go down, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, or something like that, is obviously unknown from our directress. No magic, no drama, no tragedy, only a bland tasteless yarn that tends onto a yawn."
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
Taken from the IMDB comments
