The French make the best lovers

This is the sixth screen version and, possibly because it was made by a woman, much the most lyrical and tender.

Ferran actually takes her cue from Lawrence's John Thomas and Lady Jane, an earlier and less explicit draft of Lady Chatterley's Lover. And though there are six sex scenes of some eroticism, one of which briefly shows Parkin the gamekeper's penis, there is no sense of prurience whatsoever.

Nor is this Parkin a rough beast who ravishes the lonely, sex-starved Lady Constance Chatterley, married to her crippled but busy industrialist lord, as soon and as often as he can. As played by Jean-Louis Coulloc'h, he is a burly, shy and respectful peasant who discovers gratefully that she reciprocates his feelings.

Marina Hands is Constance and, though beautiful, by no means an obvious seductress. She seems as much trying to fulfil her need for love as attempting to sate her desires. Both are remarkably good at suggesting an affair that is as much of the heart as of mere physical yearning, though that is certainly there, too.

The film is set in the Midlands but filmed mainly around Sheffield where the Industrial Revolution marked the land and miners struggled for their rights.

It is gorgeously shot and beautifully costumed, and its depiction of the British class system of the period and of the at first hesitant affair is suffused with a Gallic sensibility that does it no damage.

It is admittedly very long - it was cut down from a three-part television series - but only once, when Constance cavorts naked in a grassy glade, does cliché rear its head.

Otherwise this is a sensitive and entirely believable love story, as far from most of the other filmed versions as it is possible to be. It deservedly won four French Césars, including Best Film and Best Director.

Lady Chatterley
Cert: 18