The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) is a British drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Karel Reisz adapted John Fowles's novel with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, and cast Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons in a story that runs on two tracks simultaneously.

Victorian England: Charles, an engaged gentleman naturalist, becomes obsessed with Sarah Woodruff — a woman the town has already written off. Their secret meetings accelerate toward crisis. In the present day, the actors playing these roles — Anna and Mike — slip into an affair of their own, mirroring every fault line of the characters they perform. The film asks, quietly, whether the audience is watching a love story or its anatomy.

Streep received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and the film earned five Oscar nominations in total. Pinter's script preserves Fowles's structural trick — the double ending — while making it feel cinematic rather than literary. Watch The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) online on iFILM.