At one stage, Charlotte kisses Mary in front of the housemaid, and, in answer to Mary’s panicky look, Charlotte just shrugs that this is just a “servant”, who in turn grimaces at her snobbery. But there is no homophobic disapproval in the 21st-century sense, and Lee dispenses with the old urban myth about Victoria and Victorian society not recognising the existence of gay women. The question arises about Mary’s identity in the wider world: she seems to have had some sort of abandoned friendship with a local woman, Elizabeth (an elegant, sensitive performance from Fiona Shaw). Winslet and Ronan don’t need CGI to do this.
We can see Mary and Charlotte grow 10 years younger before our eyes – and when Mary laughs, Winslet looks the way she did in Titanic.
And it is precisely Charlotte’s effervescent, coquettish daring that allows her to take the initiative in their affair. Charlotte’s husband had been plaintively wondering where his clever wife disappeared to, and as her relationship with Mary progresses, and her mood thaws, Ronan shows us exactly where that pretty cleverness has got to – it was there all along.
Ronan’s Charlotte is glacial and pale as she gingerly picks her way along the beach behind her. Lee shows us the windswept seaspray in which Mary spends her days, crunching along the shore, grimly inspecting stones like an old prospector. But Charlotte’s melancholia is more to do with Roderick’s passionless dullness, and the more she stays with Mary, the more a new situation is revealed. He asks if, in return for a substantial cash payment, he might leave his wife behind to lodge with Anning for a while, so that the sea air and healthy scientific thoughts will cure her “melancholia”. This is Roderick Murchison (James McArdle) who has in tow his catatonically depressed wife Charlotte (Ronan). Mary lives with her placid mother: a ripe performance from Gemma Jones.Ī smoothly condescending London scientist swans in, professing to admire Anning’s work. This subsidises her serious scientific work, scouring the shore for fossils, a beachcomber for ancient evolutionary secrets. She is a scientist forced to be a shopkeeper, running a tourist trap in Lyme Regis (“Anning’s Fossils & Curios”), selling seashell-encrusted hand mirrors and the like. Winslet gives her a look of perpetual wary resentment but fierce intellectual assertion. Winslet plays Anning as a tough, capable but careworn woman, one grown accustomed to not declaring her feelings. But I have to say that – paradoxically – the figures of this bodiced and bonneted movie, despite being based on real life, seemed a tiny bit less real than the fictional figures of his previous film, God’s Own Country. It is a film about a real-life relationship speculatively reimagined with some artistic licence. Combining these alpha players doubles or actually quadruples the screen voltage, and their passion co-exists with the cool, calm subtlety with which Lee inspects the domestic circumstances in which their paths crossed. Actually, the film that swam into my head afterwards was Jane Campion’s The Piano.Īmmonite is an absorbing drama that sensationally brings together two superlative performers: Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet. The complicated power balance between the principals makes the comparison incorrect. But it isn’t exactly a tale of two French Lieutenant’s Women, despite the inevitably tense walk up the fabled Cobb, filmed in thoughtful longshot.
#Fossil ammonite movie
T he open secret of Victorian sexuality is rediscovered by film-maker Francis Lee in this fine, intimate, intelligently acted movie about forbidden love in 1840s Lyme Regis.
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