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Author:
Grace McKeaney
Writer, producer of plays, television, cable movies etc. and receipient of all sorts of acknowledgements, but most significantly, she is the mother of two beloved daughters, Kate Deirdre and Hannah Guinevere.
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Grace McKeaney is a graduate of Northwestern University and attended the Yale School Of Drama for an MFA in playwriting. A recipient of Le Conte Du Nuoy Prize for contribution to the American Theater, she is the author of ten nationally produced plays and has developed new works at both the Eugene O’Neill Conference and the Sundance Institute. A veteran of television, she has written and produced shows (for all networks and many cables) as varied as “Roseanne”, “St Elsewhere”, “The Client”, “The Hoop Life” and “The Education Of Max Bickford”. She has written movies for Lifetime, Wonderful World Of Disney and Hallmark Hall Of Fame, including “Grace and Glorie” with Gena Rowlands and Diane Lane, (winner of a Christopher Award). Grace has taught creative writing at all levels, initiating the WORD PLAY program at Baltimore’s Center Stage which took professional writers into Maryland public schools. She is the author of two (as yet) unproduced screenplays. Most significant, she is the mother of two beloved daughters, Kate Deirdre and Hannah Guinevere.
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LADY CHATTERLEY
Based on the book by D.H. Lawrence Written by Roger Bohbot, Pascale Ferran Directed by Pascale Ferran Produced by Gilles Sandoz
Co-producer Kristina Larsen
I had an extraordinary experience in a cineplex today.
I saw a film whose life sprang from an experience of love.
No buildings exploded. No one was eviscerated. There were no name stars or CGI creations to distract me. Instead for three hours (and change) two people moved from tentative, nibbling feelings of interest in each other to a full course of love and I left the theater -- on air, my spirit soaring, my mind alternately perplexed and amazed. How had a French treatment of a once banned D.H. Lawrence classic, Lady Chatterley's Lover, managed to be the most lucid and perhaps daring film I’ve seen this year? At 3 hours, with subtitles, no less?
Like many viewers at the new Landmark Theatres at the Westside Pavillion (an Arclight wannabe with comfy seats and reserved seating) I knew zip about it except after a two week limited run, it was about to leave. As I settled into my seat, I did not know this film had already won five Cesar awards in 2007 (the French equivalent of the Academy Award). Best French Film. Best Actress. Best Literary Adaptation. Best Cinematography. Best Costume. Instead, I admit I groaned (with others) to learn from the friendly Theater usher of it’s length and French subtitles. (I thought I was in for a British afternoon, thank you very much.) I'd read Lady Chatterley’s Lover decades before in college but remembered more than anything the illicit reputation it had acquired over time.
The resistance I felt to this quintessentially English story being parsed in French gave way (ten minutes in) to complete absorption in the experience of Ms. Pascale Ferran's screenplay (written with Roger Bahbot) and directed with extraordinary sensitivity by Ferran. But how? As modern movies go, nothing on screen was happening: Over several scenes Lady Chatterley simply tried without much success to find meaning in the life she has with Sir Clifford, a wealthy man invalided in the Big War. She shows no class snobbery, polishing silver and hanging clothes along with her servants. And a sighting of their gameskeeper sponge-bathing his strong but unglamerous torso against a breath-taking backdrop of pines is our (and her) first indication her personal physician may be right: Lady Chatterley's growing physical dissipation likely stems from an inability to connect meaningfully to life within the long shadows of the country manse. So, when she lifts the garden gate to begin healing walks in nature, we are glad. And we are not surprised her footsteps take her nearer again the gameskeeper’s shed..
The real-time pace with which their encounters accumulate allows for us to invest deeply in Lady Chatterley and her lover, Parken. In modern terms, it takes a long time to get to the sex. But like so much modern cinema, this story isn’t about sex for release. It’s about sex for connection and one of the lovliest key moments has Lady Chatterley falling asleep in a chair nestled near Parken’s sounds of industry as he works on a birdhouse. In this natural setting, she feels safe and calm and rejoined with her own nature. And his quiet observation of her trust, the peace with which she sleeps unguarded in his presence strengthens his own character. We feel his desire to shelter her. As viewers, we (like the characters) are getting to know the most salient features of their natures and when upon another visit Lady Chatterley, holding a newly hatched baby pheasant cries with tenderness and Parken’s own tenderness turns finally sexual, he ASKS her if she wants to do what he so powerfully wants to do. He asks her. Nothing is assumed. Nobody’s carried off by uncontrollable bodice ripping phoney-ass passions. These are two adults moving pains-takingly through the choices that carry us deeper and deeper into the fullest embrace of one another’s distinct and different natures.
And it was damned thrilling to watch them take every step.
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