Saoirse simply sensational
Saoirse Ronan, who seems to be getting better and better, is sensationally good in this haunting and masterly version of Ian McEwan’s novella. It may also be one of the best films of the year
Sex was invented in 1963, according to the poet Philip Larkin, which may have been a little late for him but certainly explains why Ian McEwan based On Chesil Beach in 1962. Because this is a tale, a tragedy even, of sexual incompetence. I don’t always get on with McEwan’s books, and when I read the 2007 novella I found it a slight, cold and somewhat unconvincing affair. But the new film version, which McEwan has adapted himself and co-produces, is just wonderful, albeit in a breakingyour-heart, blinking-back-the-tears kind of way. Up on the screen I found I could totally believe what I found so hard to accept in the book: that lives really can turn on a single moment, be it of anger, humiliation or shame. Decades later you look back on such moments, as this clever film invites us to, wondering whether if you’d played things differently, more maturely perhaps, life might have taken another path… Which, I suppose, is just another way of saying On Chesil Beach is a film for proper grown-ups. It’s tempting to go into immediate raptures about the acting, which is undeniably wonderful. But that wouldn’t be fair because this is a quietly moving triumph right across the board – from McEwan’s beautifully pared-back screenplay, through the gloriously evocative production design (look out for the melon slice and glacé cherry served as a chillingly authentic period starter) to the effortless storytelling from director Dominic Cooke, a theatre man making a stunning feature-film debut. Everything works here, even if it takes a little while to realise how well.
The story is a seemingly simple one of boy meets girl. He, Edward (Billy Howle, who was in another fine literary film adaptation, Julian Barnes’s The Sense Of An Ending), comes from an academic but modest rural background and has just got a first in history. She, Florence (Saoirse Ronan), has just got a first too, although hers is in her passion music, which provides a means of escape from her snobbish, domineering parents.
They meet in Oxford at a CND meeting; he a little drunk and handsomely dishevelled, she flame haired, beautiful and instamtly enraptured. Their romantic adventure has begun.
Already we know where it leads as the film begins on their wedding day, as they settle nervously into their stuffy seaside hotel over looking Dorset’s Chesil Beach. Their wedding night awaits but first
must endure a comedy hotel dinner, served in their room by a pair of clownish and over-intrusive waiters practising their ‘silver service’.
But the early sexual omens are not good. Edward and Florence are a fine-looking couple and clearly deeply in love but even their kissing is clumsy. Which is odd because I’m pretty sure that while sex may have not been invented until 1963, snogging definitely had, along with what was known as ‘heavy petting’.
But not by this couple, you get the impression, despite Edward’s enthusiastic but unskilled ardour.
Ronan, whose first big break came at 13 in another McEwan adaptation, Atonement, and who just seems to be getting better and better, is sensationally good here, delicately conveying Florence’s charms and contradictions. This is a young woman who is calm, kind, captivating but deceptively tough and demandingly committed to her music (she leads a high-quality string quartet). Only occasionally does she allow just a hint of a longburied dark secret. But what is it?
Edward’s problem is more obvious. Ever since she was struck by a train door, his bohemian, art-loving mother has been braindamaged, albeit in a way that leaves her dancing naked around the garden or frantically sticking pictures into scrapbooks that only she can understand. Anne-Marie Duff is an uninhibited joy in the role and the scene where she is gently sorted out by Florence is a touching delight.
Before the film’s release there were reports of at least one festival screening being punctuated by laughter as the story, after a truly heartbreaking scene on Chesil Beach, jumps forward 45 years to 2007 and suddenly two young actors are playing characters almost three times their age, heavily dependent on hair, make-up and prosthetics. I was braced for disaster but here is just a beautifully poignant scene about regret in a wonderful film that looks like being one of the cimematic highlights of the year.