The Rainbow (1989) - film review

In the late 1800s, Ursula Brangwen is determined to lead her own life, in defiance of the conventions of the time and her parents’ expectations.  For a while, she pursues a lesbian love affair with her schoolteacher and then decides that she too wants to become a schoolmistress.   She falls in love with a handsome Polish soldier Anton Skrebensky but, after a torrid affair, the passion soon burns itself out...

Twenty years after he made the definitive screen adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love, director Ken Russell finally got round to adapting the novel that preceded it, although in doing so he threw out most of the content and focussed on the final segment, which dealt with the romantic entanglements of Ursula Brangwen.  The Rainbow has very little of the artistic and dramatic brilliance of Women In Love and is a pretty lacklustre affair - passionless, plodding and mired in the heavy symbolism that now makes much of Lawrence’s work so unbearable to read.  The excellence of the performances of the supporting cast is not matched by those of the leads.  Paul McGann looks as if he is dying of boredom and Sammi Davis has neither the talent nor the charisma to carry off the part of Ursula with any conviction.  The sequences where the leads frolic about in the nude in a pastoral setting fail to be both artistic and erotic and just look ugly and gratuitous, underscoring just what an uninspired mess this is.   For a director who is renowned for his artistic excesses, The Rainbow is a disappointingly tame work, which somehow manages to totally miss the point of Lawrence’s novel.

© Steve Chandler 2011

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