Kate digs deep in rocky romance
Ammonite (15)
Verdict: Jurassic larks ★★★ Tina (15)
Verdict: A Turner to prize ★★★★
PALAEONTOLOGY, the study of fossils, is not the sexiest of subjects. Nor, usually, is early Victorian England. In Ammonite, writer- director Francis Lee overcomes these problems by casting Kate Winslet as his fossil expert and giving her a lesbian relationship with a married protegee played by Saoirse Ronan.
At a stroke, 19th-century palaeontology is sexed up, becoming the tale of a woman who finds herself between a rock and a soft place.
There is no evidence that Mary Anning, Winslet’s character, was a lesbian. We do know that her discoveries of fossils on the Dorset coast transformed understanding of prehistoric life, and that because she was female, and from humble stock, the scientific establishment of the 1840s snubbed her.
She is said, by the way, to have been the inspiration for the tongue-twister ‘She sells seashells by the seashore’.
We also know that she struck up a friendship with a woman called Charlotte Murchison (Ronan), whose husband Roderick was an acclaimed geologist.
But the real- life Charlotte was a decade older than Mary. Lee switches the age difference, doubles it and makes them lovers.
With that gigantic slab of artistic licence, the story becomes one of a clandestine relationship, although Lee keeps us waiting for the love that dared not speak its name.
Anning lives with her widowed mother Molly (a pinched Gemma Jones) in Lyme Regis. It is a gloomy household, with much to be gloomy about.
Mary squeezes a modest living out of selling her fossils, forcing her to deal with the public she appears to despise, while Molly, who has lost eight babies, instead mothers a collection of china dogs rather like Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne in The Favourite (2018), who kept rabbits as proxies for her 17 dead children.
The Favourite was a sapphic period drama too, of course; and there have been several others recently, including Colette,
Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, and on TV the excellent Gentleman Jack. It feels like one of the odder responses to #MeToo, purging history of men, or at least making them dispensable. In Ammonite there are only two of any significance: a dishy foreign doctor (Alec Secareanu), whose attempted wooing of Mary falls on very stony ground; and pompous
Roderick Murchison ( James McArdle), callously indifferent to his fragile wife.
She suffers from ‘mild melancholia’ and when he heads off on a geological expedition, he leaves her in Mary’s care. For the first hour of the film, Lee is at pains to show us that Mary gets on much better with inanimate objects than animate ones, although an awkward encounter with a genteel townswoman played by Fiona
Shaw hints heavily at a previous lesbian romance.
Dialogue is achingly sparse; Winslet and Ronan do more acting with their eyes than with their lips. But lips will have their moment. After 43 minutes, Charlotte cracks a smile. After 52 minutes, Mary follows suit. A little bit later, they smile at each other.
And soon these two women, buttoned-up in more ways than one, have managed to divest themselves of their copious undergarments and are having decidedly raunchy sex.
Their romance unlocks emotions in both of them, and because Winslet and Ronan are both such fine actresses, they keep us engaged. Can their love survive or will it, prey to the constraints of polite society, hit the rocks?
It is one of the failings of Ammonite that these are really the only rocks that interest us.
Lee, whose only previous feature God’s Own Country (2017) was also about a gay relationship, has in a curious way done Anning the same disservice as her stuffy contemporaries, making her sex more important than her work.
ANOThER singular woman, Tina Turner, is the subject of a terrific documentary, Tina, in which the male of the species is again cast in an unforgiving light.
Come to think of it, that was also true of two other compelling chronicles of abused and exploited singing superstars, both also given an evocative, single-name title: Amy (2015) and Whitney (2018).
In the case of Tina Turner’s abuser, her Svengali- like first husband Ike who forced his name on her along with much else, it’s hard to forgive. he beat her with wire coat hangers, then raped her, and her account of the night she finally left him is one of the film’s most riveting moments.
But it is also an uplifting story of survival, and contains at least one treasurable item of music trivia: Tina Turner’s thunderous 1984 anthem What’s Love Got To Do With It was a cover version of a song previously recorded by . . . Buck’s Fizz. I never knew that before, and I’m glad I do now.