Winslet exceptional in tale exploring sexual freedom
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Ammonite, Limbo ❃❃❃❃
Following up the incredible success of his debut feature God’s Own Country, writerdirector Francis Lee brought this year’s London Film Festival to a close in bleak but classy style with Ammonite, his fictionalised romantic drama about the pioneering 19 th-century palaeontolo - gist Mary Anning (played by Kate Winslet) and her complex relationship with another woman amid the weatherbeaten, fossil-rich environs of Lyme Regis in Dorset.
The woman in question is Charlotte Murchison (SaoirseRo nan ), ageo logist of some renown herself, but here re imagined as the pretty, young, clever, but depressed wife of gentleman scientist Rode rick Murchison( Ja me sM cArdle), who dumps Charlotte in Anning’s care in the hope that the sea air and Anning’s passion for fossil hunting will snap her out of her “melancholia”.
Needless to say, it’s another type of passion that will gradually reveal these women’s true selves, which initially makes Ammonite seem like an overly coy lesbian love story at a time when arthouse hits such as Carol, The Handmaiden, The Favourite and Portrait of a Lady on Fire have pushed the boundaries of this type of narrative.
Lee, however, digs beyond the surface familiarity of his plot to reveal a more layered story, one that subtly examines the intricate ways in which sexual freedom is bound up with class and gender. But it's also story about grief, particularly how someone’s personal experience of the fragility of human life can petrify them into emotional stasis, something Winslet’s exceptional performance teases out beautifully.
Having been chosen for this year’s aborted Cannes Film Festival, Scottish director Ben Sharrock’s sophomore feature, the aptly named Limbo, turned out to be one of LFF 2020’s highlights. Set on a never-named Hebridean island, this comic look at the plight of asylum seekers awaiting their fates as they get to grips with western customs, the weather and indifferent-to -hostile islanders is both hilarious and heartbreaking.
Built around a Syrian musician (wonderfully played by Amir El-masry) who has fled his war-torn homeland, the film is fully attuned to the refugee crisis but avoids Ken Loach-style didacticism with a deadpan approach that has more in common with Aki Kaurismäki, Jim Jarmusch and, of course, Bill Forsyth (the plot centrality of a phone box and the Northern Lights serves as its tribute to Local Hero). Sharrock, though, has enough mastery of his story and its execution tot ranscend any influences.
The same couldn’t be said for Possessor (***) , the second feature from Brandon Cronenberg, which, like his first film Antiviral, operates in the body horror realm of his famous father David.
But at least the new film seems to embrace that fact: its plot about an assassin (Andrea Riseborough) who can brain-hack other p eo - ple and use them to assassinate her targets can be read, perhaps, as a kind of subconscious metaphor for the younger Cronenberg’s creative process.