The French Lieutenant's Woman · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman stands at the end of the Cobb at Lyme Regis, hooded, facing out to sea. Wet stone, wind, no explanation offered. She does not turn around.

You see that shot again later in the film, and this time there is a crew around it: lights, a track, marks on the ground, somebody calling for another take. Nothing in the first version was a lie. You simply know what it is made of now, and you can't get back to not knowing.

That is the engine of Karel Reisz's film, and Harold Pinter built it. Fowles's 1969 novel had a decade-long reputation as a beautiful trap: a Victorian romance narrated by a twentieth-century voice that quotes Darwin and Hardy, stops the plot to talk about Victorian hypocrisy, and then declines to choose between two endings. Writers kept trying to solve the narrator. Pinter sacked the narrator and hired a film crew. Anna and Mike are shooting a period picture of The French Lieutenant's Woman and conducting an affair between takes. Sarah and Charles live inside the picture. Two actors, two centuries, two endings.

Deleuze has a name for what this produces, and it is worth borrowing because it describes a working part of the film. He calls it the crystal-image: a point where an actual image and its virtual double (a reflection, a memory, a performance of itself) stop being sortable and begin trading places. A mirror is the beginner's version. A film being shot inside a film is the strong version, because here the double is a whole world with its own lighting. Streep builds her two women out of diction, tempo and posture, not out of makeup. Sarah is still and formal, information withheld, her face emerging from Freddie Francis's single-source gloom. Anna is quick and unguarded, faintly evasive, in flat modern daylight. The gap between them is about a hair wide, and the hair keeps closing. Call the modern story a commentary on the period one and you have described nothing. What the crystal names is a feeding relationship. The Victorian romance lends the modern affair its intensity. The modern affair lends the Victorian romance its impossibility.

Deleuze also separates crystals that are sealed from crystals with a crack in them, a fissure through which something escapes the totality. 1981 is the year of Chariots of Fire and the Brideshead serial, and the heritage film wants the sealed kind: the national past as an unbroken room you can walk into. Reisz and his editor John Bloom keep roughly four parts Victorian to one part modern, so the frame never becomes the main event, and then they time the interruptions to land at the peaks of Victorian feeling, cutting away exactly when the romance is about to pay. Carl Davis's strings belong to the period film alone. When the music drops at a cut you feel the deflation a second before you identify its cause. That is the crack, and the film's argument lives in it.

The joins are the other invention. Deleuze's term for a cut that connects two images belonging to different worlds is the irrational cut, or the interstice: no continuity, just a gap held open and made productive. Here a gesture starts in 1867 and finishes in 1979. A line of dialogue begins in one century and lands in the next. Sound crosses before the picture does. Reisz wrote The Technique of Film Editing in 1953, the standard textbook in English for decades, and there is a fine joke in a career that ends up cutting across a gap no continuity rule covers.

Two further ideas earn their keep. The lectosign is Deleuze's word for an image that loses its self-evidence and asks to be read. The production's real technical problem was building a period film that would read on screen as a period film in the act of being made, its own lamps and clapperboards inside the frame. Pinter had rehearsed the principle in The Go-Between, where a present-tense consciousness is cut into the past so the past is continually being read rather than re-enacted; the crew-as-ensemble, with takes and rushes as punctuation, comes from Day for Night. The gest, Deleuze's borrowing from Brecht, is a posture that exposes a social relation. You can date the century by how people sit. Victorian bodies are held at the distances propriety enforced, divided by furniture and doorways, the camera keeping its proscenium manners. The moderns sprawl and overlap and occupy rooms without ceremony. Sarah's dark cloak works the same way. It conceals her and advertises her, and she is the one who chose it.

Which brings the film to what Deleuze called the powers of the false. Not lying. The abandonment of a single true version as the thing a story owes you. The Victorian narrative gets its reunion in the Lake District. The modern one ends otherwise. Neither is demoted to a rehearsal for the other, and Fowles's refusal to choose survives translation intact. In cinema it bites harder, because film's oldest contract, the one Bazin made his realism out of, is that the camera does not invent what it records. Two finer pieces sit underneath. Deleuze's forger is the figure who makes truth instead of reporting it and exists as a series of selves: Streep is precisely that here, and so, inside the fiction, is a woman who stations herself at the end of a pier and withholds the face that would settle what she is. And the film does not give you a past and a present. It gives you two presents. Both worlds were shot in and around the same Dorset locations, often on the same days. The centuries share a ground and refuse to share a truth.

The rest of the lineage is craft. Rooms lit as if by candle and window come from Francis's work on The Innocents; period photographed as painting comes from Barry Lyndon; the real locations and under-projected acting come from Reisz's own Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which is what keeps the Victorian material observation rather than pastiche. Stripping the connective dialogue so a pause carries the motive is Pinter's method from The Servant. Forward, the film's success fed the early-1980s confidence in British production that Goldcrest and Channel 4 would shortly bank on, and it did that while quietly declining the pleasure the heritage cycle was built to sell.

Watch the cuts next time, not the story. Notice where the film chooses to leave a scene. Then ask the thing it never answers: the ending we are actually permitted to enjoy belongs to the film inside the film. What does it cost to take it?