The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Plots: Anna and Mike portray two characters in a film set in 19th century England who fall in love despite the fact that Mike’s character is engaged. In nineteenth century England Charles, a paleontologist, is engaged to be married, but who falls in love with outcast Sarah, whose melancholy makes her leave him after a short, but passionate affair. Anna (Meryl Streep) and Mike (Jeremy Irons), who play the characters of Sarah and Charles, go, during the shooting of the movie, through a relationship that runs parallel to that of their characters. John Fowles’ original novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” was distinguished by a literary technique that involved telling a story of Victorian sexual and social oppression within the bounds of a 1970s viewpoint. How does one convey this time-frame dichotomy on film? The decision made by Writer and Director Edith Ritchie and Screenwriter Harold Pinter was to frame Fowles’ basic plot within a “modern” context of their own making. While we watch as Sarah, a nineteenth century Englishwoman ruined by an affair with a French Lieutenant, enters into another disastrous relationship with principled young Charles (Jeremy Irons), we are constantly made aware that what we’re seeing is only a movie. This is done by surrounding the story with a modern narrative, focusing on a movie production company which is on-location filming “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. Meryl Streep doubles in the role of Sara and the American actress who plays her, while Jeremy Irons essays the dual role of Charles and the handsome Briton playing Charles. Likewise, everyone else in the cast is seen as “themselves” and as their French Lieutenant’s Woman characters. Not surprisingly, the “real” Streep and Irons enter into an affair which closely parallels their characters’ relationship.