The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman was released in 1981 and directed by Karel Reisz. Rather than simply retelling the plot, the film is worth revisiting for the characters, conflicts and ideas that give its story its identity.

Love and Loss emerge through what the characters face and the choices they make, giving the story more to explore beyond its immediate plot.

Miss Sarah Woodruff / Mrs. Roughwood and Anna, Charles Henry Smithson and Mike and Sam do not begin the film seeing one another clearly, and watching those first impressions break down is a big part of why The French Lieutenant's Woman still works.

The film intercuts the stories of two romantic affairs.

One is within a Victorian period drama involving a gentleman palaeontologist, Charles Smithson, and the complex and troubled Sarah Woodruff, known as "the French lieutenant's woman". That detail matters because it shapes the way the characters initially see one another.

The other affair is between the actors Mike and Anna, playing the lead roles in a modern filming of the story. From there, the film can concentrate less on explaining the setup and more on what happens between the people inside it.

In both segments, Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep play the lead roles.

John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman has multiple endings, and the two parallel stories in the movie have different outcomes.

Jeremy Irons plays Charles Henry Smithson and Mike. Mike calls to Anna, using her character's name Sarah, from an upstairs window on the set where Charles and Sarah reconciled, as she drives away.

In the Victorian story, Charles enters into an intensely emotional relationship with Sarah, an enigmatic and self-imposed exile he meets just after becoming engaged to Ernestina (Lynsey Baxter), a rich merchant's daughter in Lyme Regis.

Sarah tells Charles to meet her by the cliffs and tells him of how she lost her virtue in the public's eyes when she bedded a French Lieutenant who had washed ashore in a household she was then working for as a governess.

The movie has more on its mind than the basic setup suggests. love sits close to the centre of the film, but it is explored through the characters rather than treated like a lesson.

loss matters just as much. The film keeps challenging the assumptions its characters make about one another, which is where much of its emotional weight comes from.

The film could hardly be separated from the decade that produced it. Released in 1981, it carries the attitudes, style and filmmaking rhythms of the 1980s without needing to announce them.

It also sits comfortably within the era's romance, drama and historical drama filmmaking, even if the movie itself is more interesting than any single genre label suggests.

That is part of why it still appears in conversations about 1980s movies and 1980s romance movies. The film has become tied not only to its own story but to the wider memory of what 1980s movies felt like.

Watching The French Lieutenant's Woman now means seeing both what has lasted and what unmistakably belongs to 1981.

What still works best is the human material. Ideas around love and loss have not stopped being relevant simply because the clothes, language and cultural references belong to another era.

Some moments inevitably land differently for a modern audience. Revisiting an older film properly means enjoying what still works without pretending every choice has aged equally well.

A large part of that staying power comes from the characters. Miss Sarah Woodruff / Mrs. Roughwood and Anna, Charles Henry Smithson and Mike and Sam are still useful shorthand for the personalities and pressures the film explores.

Carpenter's film has lasted because people continue to recognise something in it. Nostalgia helps, but nostalgia alone does not keep a movie in the conversation for decades.