Female scent Horse History
In the access appeared a curious paraphrase "Lady Chatterley's Lover". Not a film adaptation, not an interpretation based on motives, but simply an independent - French - story, "amazingly" echoes the classical English novel. The director and co-creator of the script, Gilles Legrand, seems to do everything to disguise the connection with Lawrence’s book, but it does not matter. What is remarkable, the British themselves shot last year on the BBC another version of the famous novel – as if adapted for middle school students, that is, smoothed to such an extent that it is quite possible to watch with children. And the fact that the French are not indifferent to it is fully explained by the peculiarity of the Gallic mentality, which has already twice been satisfied with its own transfer to the screen of the plot about the scandalous adultery. Legrand apparently decided that his potential is far from exhausted.
In 1918, a nurse, Angela, who has a young daughter from her husband who died in the war, gets a nurse in the house of a former cavalry officer Charles, who, after losing his leg at the front, now spends his days in his country estate in sad loneliness. Gradually, warmer feelings begin to emerge between a young woman and a 48-year-old bachelor. Their joint pastime becomes longer, and conversations are more frank. At some point, when Charles’s attraction is already quite unambiguous, he, like “an old soldier who does not know the words of love,” makes Angela a specific offer that she “difficult to refuse.” However, a single mother puts forward a number of conditions in response, which the owner of a rich estate accepts almost unconditionally, agreeing even to serious restrictions regarding their future intimate relationships.
In the second part, the film, which begins as a romantic melodrama about a quite acceptable mesalliance, rapidly transforms into an erotic drama, where bed scenes follow one another, and a young deserter Leonard is urgently parachuted into the plot to increase emotional tension. Together with him, a stately crow stallion appears in the estate, which becomes the object of interest of both Charles and Angela - great lovers of horseback riding. It must be admitted that the horse theme, indicated even in the title (in which the nickname of the master mare was placed), for all its importance, rather interferes with, rather than helps, the main storyline, by this point already almost openly parasitic on the plot of Sir Lawrence. At any rate, on Tuesdays, the only day Charles is given access to Angela's body, they never get any good in bed.
But instead of concentrating entirely on this full-fledged theme in itself, the director is increasingly shipping horse twists and turns into the plot, the apotheosis of which is the mare of Mandarinka and the stallion brought by Leonard. This scene, shown in all physiological details, on the one hand, makes you remember the scandalous erotic opus Valerian Borovchik called “The Beast”, on the other hand, at least somehow helps to explain the name of this film, which has (following the logic of events) the relation to the heat – the period when the mare is ready to mate with a stallion. However, Legrand does not manage to organically and clearly connect and intertwine human problems and animal needs, at least, as Shohei Imamura did in the Legend of Narayama.
Therefore, as events unfold, the bedtime of Charles and Angela is not so much resolved as blurred by secondary events. Whether the desire to gush the parallels with Lawrence’s book, or the lack of proper talent, Legrand’s story turns out to be, perhaps, cute at the level of visual decision, but not very cassy at the level of drama. In any case, so much so as to satisfy the needs of at least that part of the public that is attentive to everything that concerns both unsatisfied sexuality and, more broadly, the topic of gender relations.