Talk:The French Lieutenant's Woman (film)

Was Meryl on The Cobb?
The Cobb is the old harbour wall at Lyme Regis where we see "that scene" as she stands on the harbour wall as the waves crash around her.

But on a TV documentary (Countrywise on ITV London) they were visiting various places on the Dorset coast. When they visited Lyme Regis they spoke to someone who was there when they filmed The French Lieutenant's Woman who said that it was deemed too dangerous for Meryl to get up onto the Cobb. So any distance shots actually have one of the art directors standing in for her. The close ups were done in the safety of the studio.

Could there be any truth to this? Or is it just a local legend?

See ITV from 13:30 (Expires in 29 days) -- SteveCrook (talk) 18:59, 16 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Insurance rules restrict what you can do with your principal players even in cases where the principal may be willing to undertake something with an element of risk.
 * You can't shut down production for a couple of months because the lead wanted to try something brave.
 * Varlaam (talk) 16:56, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

"Plot"
The section headed "Plot" is a mish-mash of inaccuracies, errors and wild misinterpretations, ineptly phrased by someone who seems neither to have read the book nor to have seen the film. For instance:

''To understand the film, you need to understand the book. In the book, Fowles starts to tell the story of a French lieutenant, and likely a refugee from the French Revolution, who lands in an English village where an equally mysterious and available woman happens to live.''

The first sentence is untrue (at best it's a biased opinion). As for the second sentence, the novel begins in 1867, more than half a century after the end of the French Revolution, and it doesn't start by "telling the story" of Varguennes.

The first chapter begins conventionally enough, followed in linear fashion by the second, where the hero and heroine happen to take a walk in the same wood on the same day but fail to happen to meet.

The first two clauses of this is like a joke, while the second half of the sentence is factually not only untrue (the non-meeting occurs much later) but the phrase "fail to happen to meet" isn't English.

All along, each chapter retells the preceding chapter but with a different ending.

Untrue.

''Viewers who had read and liked the novel tended to leave the cinema delighted by Reisz's ingenuity while non-readers tended to feel frustrated at getting two stories for the price of one. Then again, some readers of the novel felt the same frustration of feeling the intrusion of reality into the novel.''

Original research (or just made up).

In my view, the entire section as written needs deleting and redoing. 86.172.221.17 (talk) 16:48, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Let me take a crack at it. "Except for Meryl Streep, this movie sucks. " I think that captures the essence. 100.36.196.216 (talk) 23:16, 1 May 2016 (UTC) Vainamoinen