Fossils fuel a forbidden love
THE BIG RELEASE AMMONITE 15 ★★★✩✩
‘ITHOUGHT I was going to hang up my hat when it came to nudity on screen,’ declared Kate Winslet earlier this year – but it seems the right project can still coax off Kate’s kit. A film of sublime texture and thoughtful intensity, Ammonite inserts a steamy (and entirely fictional) lesbian romance into the life of Mary Anning (Winslet).
For those unfamiliar with the her story, Anning was a real-life amateur fossil hunter who was belittled by the male Victorian establishment but has since been reclaimed as a female palaeontologist pioneer by today’s primary school curriculum.
This scenario finds Mary as an ossified, middle-aged spinster, eking out a harsh, near-mute existence with her heavily depressed mother (Gemma Jones) by the seashore at Lyme Regis.
It’s hard to see what would have attracted Charlotte to the charmless Mary
Here, Mary scrabbles around in the mud and cold (there’s a lot of mud and cold in this film), clawing out specimens to sell in their moribund shop.
Enter Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan), a pale, pretty, grieving young gentlewoman whose husband pays Mary to look after her while he jaunts off around Europe having fun. It’s only a matter of time before the women’s fingertips brush over a fossil and the forbidden, passionate glances start. Can Charlotte break open Mary’s stony heart to expose the treasures therein?
It’s unfortunate that Ammonite had to follow 2020’s blazingly acclaimed Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, another radical, visionary, seashore-based lesbian period romance. It isn’t as exquisitely worked, and nor does it equal the charge and power of Ammonite writer/director Francis Lee’s five-star debut, God’s Own Country.
Lee clearly intimately adores his inarticulate characters but they are teetering on underwritten here. Despite committed performances from two of the finest actresses of their respective generations, it’s hard to see what would have attracted Charlotte to the charmless Mary, who stomps around with what can only be described as a face like a slapped arse.
Yet even its flaws are fascinating. More about class than homophobia, it’s a slow-burn story that confounds our period movie expectations. That said, viewers waiting for Winslet and Ronan to get it on in the bravely authentic sex scenes the actors choreographed themselves will have their patience sorely stretched.
Out Friday on all major digital platforms