'The French Lieutenant's Woman' (Karel Reisz, 1981)

@tyler I know I told you months ago I'd watch it asap, well I finally have!

I really liked it, and it's baffling I hadn't seen it sooner. As Irons says in the video above - "turn on the French Lieutenant's Woman...and dream." What's interesting at first is how Karel Reisz and Pinter trouble the "verisimilitude" by telling us right away we're watching a performance, and those first few transitions to the modern actors they're awaking in bed and sort of awaking on the beach, so to me it gave the "movie" scenes a vaguely dreamlike quality, though they work very well on their own as well as eventually, as it goes on and settles and strengthens together, as an extension/parallel to the actors and their emotional problem - the negative valence of their love affair(s). And the ending(s), how they ironically differ, I really love...

Reisz trusts our patience and like many of his endings (Night Must Fall, The Gambler, Everybody Wins) he isolates the character into their truest tragic state. Aesthetically.... Reisz gives those Victorian scenes a moody at times Gothic aura, and Freddie Francis' visuals add to that as they're so soft and lush and earthy and ominous...... his two-shots are masterly (pics below - how Irons sees the fiancée in a small assaultive way, and then how he looks at Streep in front). Acting is phenomenal - in the forest scene Streep has that amazing monologue ("It is shame that has kept me alive") and that aspect of shame I kept thinking about in their perfs, it's treated with delicate elegance in the movie scenes, or intensely like that last reunited scene - three years is a long time and suddenly time itself doesn't seem to matter, and how Irons looks at her, it isn't brightly or lovingly so much as it's a dire, deep look from his consuming and impossible love - the Irons specialty! I was reminded of Betrayal and Damage during multiple scenes.