AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Wordiezett So much average

Jenna Walter The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

gridoon2018 Personally I don't much care for the term "chick flick", but "The French Lieutenant's Woman" probably falls under that category - albeit a chick flick of the highest order. Handsomely staged, impeccably crafted, well acted, ingeniously structured....but not as dramatically involving as it should have been, until the bittersweet ending(s). *** out of 4.

victoriavaradi-47267 I think the film shows us how difficult it is for people to achieve true love, regardless of the age they live in. Although it might seem that today there is less direct pressure from society, but there are other different reasons to make people stay in the status quo, convenience can be very powerful too. In the very beginning of the film Anne watches herself (Sarah) in the mirror, which in one hand is the beginning of Ana's, the actress's transformation into Sarah, and in my eyes it is also a nice allegory of how the two parallel stories in the film reflect on each other. They are in fact more or less the same, except from the ending. In the film Ana and Mike are acting in, Sarah and Charles end up together, but Ana and Mike don't stay together. For me the overall message of the film was, that romantic love only triumphs in tales, in a romanticized world, but not in reality. I liked the contrasting cinematic styles of the two story lines, the acting was great, and also liked the different endings. For me the main flaw was that the "present" story-line felt very much overpowered by the Victorian story-line, it felt it was less important, and we also didn't get to know too much about Ana and Charles. Even if portraying the two relationships in an equally significant way would have been very very difficult in two hours, but I think it would have served the theme of the film better. Plus because I don't believe in love at first sight, it's always hard for me to believe that two characters can fall deeply in love with each other as fast as Sarah and Charles did.

evanston_dad John Fowles' pastiche of Victorian novels is a smashing read, but Karel Reisz's film, while not exactly ruining it, sure does suck a lot of the life out of it.Instead of presenting the story in an over-heated, slightly exaggerated manner, which is probably the right way to adapt Fowles' novel, Reisz and screenwriter Harold Pinter decide to address the meta element of the book by breaking the film into two intercut segments: one is the story that actually makes up the narrative of the novel while the other is a contemporary one about the making of the movie, with Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep playing actors playing Fowles' characters. It's a pointless approach, as the contemporary scenes don't add anything to the film but length. It also doesn't help that Irons and Streep, though both immensely talented actors, aren't exactly the go-to people for breast- heaving, corset-rending passion. One who had never read Fowles' novel would come nowhere near having a sense of how great it is based on this adaptation alone.It's a handsome looking film, I'll give it that, and I'm not the only one who thinks so, as it garnered Academy Award nominations for Art Direction and Costume Design back in 1981. Its juggling of two parallel stories impressed the Academy into giving it an editing nomination as well. The last two of its five nominations went to Pinter for his screenplay and Streep, in one of her few undeserved nominations, for Best Actress.Grade: B

speedo58 Spoilers! The film is very disappointing. The lack of chemistry between the two stars, the insertion of the modern story with the lack of chemistry between the players within the modern story, the overacting by all the actors (or is it poor directing?) the length of the film, the assumption that we would believe Sarah a virgin when Charles finds her at the hotel, that we would believe Jeremy's character would be so gullible and go against very inflexible norms of Victorian behavior, the fact that the heroine should have been an English actress, the attempt to too literally adapt the novel to film, and then the overlay of Darwin, Freud, and the Pre-Raphealite Brotherhood just made a totally unengaging, wearing film.