Lady Chatterley affair still potent, says director

BERLIN, Feb 12 (Reuters) It is almost 80 years since D H Lawrence wrote ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'', but its celebration of erotic self-awakening still resonates today, said French film-director Pascale Ferran, who filmed the English classic.

''We often see sexuality from only its destructive side,'' Ferran told reporters at the Berlin Film Festival yesterday.

''Showing sexuality as a source of joy in cinema has not been done so often and it is worth showing it today,'' she added.

In a new film spanning almost three hours, Ferran depicts the love affair between upper-class Constance Chatterley and her wheelchair-bound husband's gamekeeper, spotlighting the sex scenes which saw the book branded so scandalous its publisher was tried for obscenity.

Her film ''Lady Chatterley'' is faithful to the book's rural English setting in the period shortly after World War One.

Shots of budding twigs, flowing streams, and the vitality of the natural world in contrast to the stifling environment of an English country house are also indebted to Lawrence's prose.

''D H Lawrence didn't write the book only as an attack against puritanical English society. He was trying to make a statement too that sexuality is a part of life, not something to be ashamed of,'' Ferran said.

''It is part of the emotional aspect of everyone's life, it can transform people ... that is why the book is still striking today.'' Lady Chatterley is played by young French actress Marina Hands, who said she worked hard to capture the character's progression from an inhibited wife terrified yet fascinated by the sight of the gamekeeper's naked back, to an impulsive woman who can dance naked in a rainstorm with her lover.

''She lives a very strict, structured life and she breaks free from this and I tried to work on this -- on how the body frees itself gradually,'' she said.

''I put on weight for the film. It was important that my body should emerge as a real presence at the end and not as something restrained,'' she added.

Lawrence's novel was finally published in England in 1960, thirty years after his death, but its publication by Penguin Books sparked a high-profile obscenity trial.

Penguin won after successfully defending the book's literary merit, in a case seen as a watershed in opening up British arts and society.

REUTERS PDM PM0937