Frustrated by an enervating lack of intimacy with her wealthy husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley (Girardot), a WWI veteran paralyzed from the waist down, twenty-something beauty Constance Chatterley (Hands) embarks on a wild, but soul-satisfying love affair with Parkin (Coulloc'h), a stocky groundskeeper at their estate.

D.H. Lawrence's scandalous novel, an erotic classic, has been adapted for the big screen before, but never with as much unrestrained, heavy-breathing sensualism or adulterous abandon. This is no high-grade smut flick, though: Ferran heightens the transcendent elements of Lawrence's parable of freedom to a blissfully enlightening pitch, making us yearn as deeply for Lady Chatterley's existential healing as if our own happiness were at stake. Have landscapes in the movies — verdant fields; Edenic, rustic rendezvous points — ever seemed more alive or inviting to the experience of passion? This is one literary retelling that inarguably benefitted from a woman's touch.