Two lesbians and a competitor Screening of a little-known novel by David Herbert Lawrence
Two thirty-year-old women, Jill and Ellen, live on a secluded farm together. Moreover, if Jill performs female duties, then Ellen prefers to wear trousers instead of a dress, which, however, judging by some scenes, does not make her less sensual nature. Their idyllic existence in the bosom of nature is violated only by a fox caught in a chicken coop. It is he who becomes the prototype and the key symbol of this story, in which the appearance of a man does not take long to wait.
It turns out to be Paul, the grandson of the former farm owner, who in ignorance decided to visit his grandfather, who has already moved to another world. Like the hero of Pasolini’s Theorem (which was shot a year later), the uninvited guest tempts and destroys the harmonious existence of the inhabitants of the house. The triumph of heterosexualism over homosexuality reflects the views of ordinary people on this subject not only at that time, but often at the present time. For the majority of the male population today firmly believe that a lesbian is such only until a real man appears in her life.
The Fox sticks a big, fat nail in the opposite opinion, but avoids simplistic interpretations of this thesis. Because at least in the role of sophisticated, against the rules, there is Jill, who seems to do everything to be considered an active, dominant lesbian. The director, however, this stereotype is not embarrassing: through subtle and verified acting works (here Rydel probably needed his artistic education), he quite convincingly paints the story of the rivalry between Jill and Paul for the right to own Ellen. Another - musical - education could also help the director, but placing the right accents with the help of music, he sometimes does so diligently that does not leave the viewer the slightest chance to interpret a particular scene in any other way.
This classic lesbian drama, based on the scandalous novel by David Herbert Lawrence at the dawn of the sexual screen revolution, only recently appeared in Russia with a translation. It became the directorial debut in a big movie for 33-year-old American Mark Rydel, who went to neighboring Canada to implement this project. This circumstance partly contributed to the fact that the film was awarded the Golden Globe Award as the best foreign film shot in English. Meanwhile, the vicissitudes of love relations between two lesbians and a visiting sailor became the reason for prohibitions in a number of American states, where even at the end of the sixties they were not ready to calmly accept the fact that two women can freely live in a civil marriage.
The son of the British miner, Lawrence, in this – not the most famous – his creation (unlike the novels “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “Sons and Lovers”), nevertheless, was much ahead of his Puritan time. But even the transfer of screen action in the 1960s, seemed in the States defiant and unacceptable freethinking, corrupting morals. Initially, the film began to be widely shown in cinemas in the United States with a rating of “adults only”, but once in Mississippi two cops accidentally got to a session and were outraged by the obscenities of lesbian love. Which is quite strange, because the maximum that the heroines could afford is to sleep in the same bed. And the only scene of intercourse here is exclusively heterosexual in nature, unless, of course, take into account Ellen naked from the back, imitating masturbation at the very beginning.
However, this “classic case of hardcore pornography” was brought before a jury that failed to reach a unanimous decision. Almost half a century after its appearance, this psychological study of the war between the sexes does not even look like a tradition of antiquity. On the contrary, it can become almost the main decoration of the retrospective of any of the participants in the shooting, as well as the filmography of Lawrence himself, which has (including TV series) already more than forty adaptations.