Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1981

The Contenders:

The French Lieutenant’s Woman
On Golden Pond (winner)
Pennies from Heaven
Prince of the City
Ragtime

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1981

The Contenders:

Susan Sarandon: Atlantic City
Meryl Streep: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Katharine Hepburn: On Golden Pond (winner)
Marsha Mason: Only When I Laugh
Diane Keaton: Reds

Deux for the Price of Un

Film: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on laptop.

The concept of a story within a story, a play within a play, or a movie within a movie is hardly a new one. Typically when something like this happens, the conceit is that the “real world” story mirrors the inner story in some significant way. That’s absolutely the case with The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Here, the surface story is about the making of a film about a Victorian romance. And, naturally, the story of that film within the film very much has parallels in a relationship in the real world.

This actually isn’t that difficult, but it’s tough to explain. I’ll do my best. In the film within the film, a Victorian scientist named Charles Henry Smithson (Jeremy Irons) has proposed marriage to a proper woman of some substance named Ernestina (Lynsey Baxter). Ernestina is the epitome of what a Victorian woman should be, and the romance appears to be pure in all ways that we expect the almost Puritanical Victorian romance ideal should be. Soon after the proposal, Charles becomes aware of Sarah (Maryl Streep), a woman who is the subject of many unsavory rumors in the area. Sarah is called “the French Lieutenant’s Woman” because of a very public affair with a French soldier. Of course, Charles becomes infatuated with sarah, and as the story progresses, the two slowly fall in love with each other despite the social differences and the social suicide that even spending time with a woman considered all but a whore is for Charles.