Women in Love Reviews

Fine adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's classic novel with some interesting visual sequences typical of director Russell's style. It is 1920s England. Jackson is a free-thinking artist who, along with her schoolteacher sister, Linden, watches from a graveyard as Gurney and Christopher Gable are married. Later, at an outdoor luncheon given for the couple, the two women meet Reed and Bates. Bates, a school inspector, constantly ruminates on the topic of love and begins a fledgling relationship with Linden. At a picnic at the plush home of Gurney's wealthy family, the newlyweds are lost beneath the dark waters of the estate's lake. When the water is drained from the lake, the two drowned bodies are discovered entwined together in the muddy lake bed. That night Bates and Reed, in a discussion on friendship, strip before a fireplace and engage in a nude wrestling match. After Bates and Linden marry, they go with Reed and Jackson for a honeymoon in Switzerland. Jackson meets Sheybal, a sculptor like herself, and engages in an affair with the bisexual man, when her sister and brother-in-law leave Switzerland. Reed, enraged at Sheybal's intrusion, attacks the man and tries to choke Jackson. Then Reed flees into the snow and wanders until he dies. Bates, stunned by the death, still questions the mystery of relations between men and women. There are moments of great beauty here, such as the view of Bates and Linden running naked into each other's arms in a wheatfield. The camera is turned horizontally, and the bodies seem to defy gravity, moving up and down within the frame through the golden vegetation. In another, much-heralded piece of editing, Russell cuts from the intertwined bodies of Bates and Linden after a lovemaking session to the cold, stiff corpses of Gurney and Gable on the bottom of the emptied lake. Russell did some of his own camerawork (although Williams received credit as cinematographer) and showed an excellent eye for shot composition and editing rhythms. His ability as a storyteller is less in evidence, however. Despite the passion of the topic and the beauty of the images, the narrative tends toward the static, particularly in the later stages. Russell incorporated many dance images into WOMEN IN LOVE, expanding on what he considered to be a central theme of the novel. He later stated that he "should have turned the whole thing into a musical; it wasn't far off in some ways."