Haunting portrait of a honeymoon
On Chesil Beach (M, 110mins) Directed by Dominic Cooke. Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
The year is 1962. If you lived in London and squinted hard then maybe you could have seen the sexual revolution just appearing on the horizon.
But in rural Dorset, on a long bank of stone and pebbles known as Chesil Beach, the future is still a long way away.
Too bad for newly-minted newlyweds Florence and Edward. If they had waited a year or so maybe the shackles of society would have loosened enough for them to not have made such a nervous, fumbling mess of their mutual first time as lovers.
The music on the wireless might have been a lot better, too.
But now, with guilt, shame and insecurity informing their every syllable, the couple fight and plead to save their day-old marriage.
Everything that leads On Chesil Beach to this sorry state of affairs has been laid out with economy, wit and great insight by director Dominic Cooke.
Cooke is a theatre veteran making his film debut here. He handles the minutiae of the couple’s emotional terrain beautifully, while the choreography of their courtship and pre-marriage months are similarly well sketched in.
Ian McEwan adapted On Chesil Beach from his own novella. Another writer probably wouldn’t have dared make the departures and changes McEwan throws around here.
One moment in particular hints at a past for Florence I’m sure the book never contained. It deepens the story profoundly.
In the leads, Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle are pretty much perfect, getting through McEwan’s savagely petty dialogue, while communicating more with stance and gesture than was ever on the page.
The small but horribly relevant class-divide between Florence and Edward is close to the heart of McEwan’s narrative. Both actors skewer it perfectly.
Anne Marie Duff and Emily Watson are fantastic as Edward’s and Florence’s respective mothers.
On Chesil Beach is about love crippled by upbringing. It is a sad, cruelly funny and absolutely beautifully staged, scored and photographed film.
Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (12 Years a Slave) shoots the spaces that divide people better than anyone I know. His work here is worth your ticket alone.
My only criticism – and not everyone will share it – is of the two flash-forwards that bring the film to a close.
The first picks up Edward’s life in 1975, showing us where he has arrived a dozen years after that windswept walk on the stones. It works well enough and I think would have made an acceptable and resonant place to roll the credits.
But then McEwan offers up another scene, this one set in 2007, and a glimpse of a Florence and Edward in old age. And although it contains what I guess is McEwan’s message – that a life’s trajectory can be dictated by one youthful stupidity – it is still. The ‘‘old-age’’ makeup job on Ronan does the film no favours at all.
On the page, On Chesil Beach is a sinuous, dark and haunting little beast. On the screen it is very nearly – not quite – an absolute triumph. But still recommended.
The small but horribly relevant class-divide between Florence and Edward is close to the heart of McEwan’s narrative. Both actors skewer it perfectly.