This is a fairly successful film adaptation of the novel, so to speak, because it subtly shows the multiple endings in the original in a way that adds a new storyline.
The beginning of the movie made me confused. I didn't know the details of the novel and the movie beforehand. In the first twenty-five minutes, its various scenes and characters gave me a very confusing feeling. It's quite unfriendly to a face blindness like me. It's the era of carriages and gentlemen for a while, and the era of electric lights and cars for a while. If it wasn't for the needs of the course, I might have given up watching it. In order to overcome these problems, I had to replay it bit by bit and watch it repeatedly to remember names and face shapes. Finally, I found that among them, Charles and Mike looked exactly the same, Sarah and Anna looked exactly the same, and Sarah was also called Woodruff, and she looked different from Ernestina. It was very difficult for me to distinguish these, and then I observed By the time Charles and Sarah were in the carriage, Mike and Anna were in the car, and Mike and Anna's discussion of 18th century London gave me some guesswork. It wasn't until the twenty-fifth minute, when Mike and Anna discussed the way Sarah fell, that I was convinced that they were two actors, and the other scene was a scene from a play they were doing.
Before watching the movie, I only knew that this movie was about a love story developed on and off the screen by two people who played the male and female protagonists in the same movie. But what amazes me is that its presentation of the plot of the characters in the play is not the feeling of the shooting scene, but the same as outside the play. The advantage is that the part inside the play is more real and easier to resonate with the audience. The disadvantage is also obvious. It is too easy to dance, which is also related to the fact that the film did not clearly explain the boundaries between inside and outside the play at the beginning.
However, when you patiently see the middle part, the story becomes much clearer. We know that in the play, Charles has a fiancee, Ernestina, who is in love with Sarah, and falls in love with Sarah; The two storylines cross in parallel, similar but different. The original novel "The French Lieutenant's Woman" is a novel written by British writer John Fowles. The novel breaks through the traditional narrative method of Western novels and uses three narrators with different identities, purposes and functions to tell the story. The three narrators narrate from different positions, and constantly dismantle and overthrow the narrations of other narrators. The original story only tells the story of Charles/Sarah, and the story of Mike/Anna is added in the movie. The movie cleverly adds the story of love between male and female protagonists and uses two different endings to show the open-ended novel in the novel. ending.
In the novel, there are different endings due to the different narrators. One of the endings is that Charles did not repent of his engagement with Ernestina, and he did not go to Sarah again. From then on, Charles and Ernestina were happy. live together. In the second ending, Charles ruins his engagement to Ernestina and becomes a disinherited and disgraced man. Sarah fled to London without informing him. But it took him three years to finally find Sarah, and Charles discovered the existence of his young daughter, suggesting that he was with Sarah. In the third ending, Sarah decides to find freedom and independence and refuses to live with Charles, who misses his daughter, implying the separation of the two.
The movie uses the separation of Mike and Anna off-screen to show the original endings one and three, the two are separated, but they live happily with their wives/husbands, using the reunion, forgiveness and reunion of Charles and Sarah in the play To show the second ending of the original book, Charles abandoned his original wife and lived happily with Sarah.
Personally, I feel that there is one shortcoming of the movie. The emotional line between Charles and Sara in the "play" has a sense of intentionality, which is unnatural. This kind of unnaturalness appears in the 25th minute of the film. In the previous scene, Sara still loves Charles. The state of ignorance told Charles to stop following her, but after the scene of "off-screen" Mike and Anna discussing the way Sarah fell, the distance between "on-screen" Charles and Sarah suddenly narrowed. Many, many, Sarah's eyes suddenly became emotional when she looked at Charles, and she was willing to share her past with Charles, which was a bit too abrupt. Perhaps the explanation can be attributed to the lack of the crew in the play leading to the lack of "in-play" plots.
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