Women in Love

Ken Russell – 1969 – England

It would be a sad mistake to imagine Ken Russell’s Women in Love as a prim and dutiful adaptation of a classic novel as you might find on Masterpiece Theatre or on the resume of Merchant & Ivory.  In adapting D.H. Lawrence – (for the first of three times in his career) – Russell does what the truest auteurs must always do:  1) find cinematic alternatives to literary concepts (something few directors manage well at all), and 2) fuse his own style and interests with the author’s so that what we get is not a CliffsNotes-style summary of a book but an organic film that uses the novel as a springboard to allow the director to address the themes that concern him.  By doing both these things so sublimely, Russell creates a film that is bursting with life in every frame and somehow makes you forget Lawrence as much as intuitively understand him.  Infamous in its day for the brief (and unprecedented) sight of male genitals flopping about far back in a few shots, Women in Love was awarded an X-rating and yet, like Midnight Cowboy of the same year, went on to win Oscars, specifically for star Glenda Jackson.  The thing that strikes me most about seeing the film in 2014 is how forward-thinking Ken Russell was 45 years ago; how he refused to be stifled by the ways that issues of sensuality were dealt with and considered acceptable at that time.  Much like his contemporaries Fellini and Russ Meyer, he presented a vision of sex in his films that was so advanced that it is almost futuristic, seeming all the stranger in a story set about the time of World War I.  In this world, plausible or not, women are just as free as men to explore and experiment, and physical and/or emotional attractions between men signify neither the end of the world nor the abandonment of one “lifestyle” for another overnight.  Sex is only the pull of nature, and the theme of Russell’s film – as he puts it himself in his commentary track – is the regenerative power of nature.