I intended to go to bed early Sunday night because I had errands to run Monday--but noooo, just as I was turning off the TV, "Lady Chatterly" came on the Sundance Channel. This was the French version of D.H. Lawrence's novel "Lady Chatterly's Lover."

It had subtitles, and when a movie has subtitles you can't make a run to the bathroom etc. because you'll miss what's happening; you have to be reading the bottom of the screen continuously. A movie in English, you can wash dishes or go to the bathroom and still hear what's occuring. And the French version was leisurely and went on and on but was impossible to stop watching.

Lady Constance Chatterly was an unfulfilled woman--her husband Clifford was paralyzed from the waist down, and "Connie" was lonely and bored. She took to walking the grounds of the estate and met Oliver, the stocky balding gamekeeper. He was a loner, but the ice thawed between them and they had a torrid affair. The part where they ran naked through the woods in the rain, then came in and decorated each others bodies with wildflowers was memorable and somehow innocent.

This was one of the books banned from public libraries for a long time, to protect the public from obscenity. As soon as I could I got hold of this book, and a couple of other ones that had previously been banned, I read them, just to know that it was nobody's business what I might read.

(The English movie version was good, and the character of Oliver was played by a much handsomer actor.)

A couple of nights before I had watched another movie with subtitles, a Russian made movie, with a simple theme. An elderly woman, a babushka, square and solidly built with a no nonsense attitude, travels to the post in Chechnya where her grandson is serving in the Russian Army. The guards at the gate refuse to let her in--the grandson is out on maneuvers-- but she persists until they relent and let her stay in a ramshackle hut.

She walks into the nearest Chechnian town and makes friends with a woman selling black market cigarettes. This woman takes babushka to her drab apartment in the destroyed town and makes her some tea, welcomes her to lie on her sofa for a while and gives her 2 cartons of cigarettes to take back to the guards. Though their countries are at war, the two old ladies become friends. The intraction between babushka and her new friend, the grandson, and the respect the soldiers show her was realistic and a great story.

susil