AMMONITE TBC
FILM
OUT NOW DIGITAL HD
Francis Lee’s exemplary debut, God’s Own Country, explored a romance between two men on a Yorkshire farm. His follow-up, Ammonite, tracks the burgeoning relationship of two women on the windswept south coast in the mid-19th century.
Kate Winslet plays Mary Anning, the real-life palaeontologist who was excluded from the male scientific establishment despite her pioneering work. Saoirse Ronan is fellow geologist Charlotte Murchison, here presented as the sickly wife of scientist Roderick Murchison (James McArdle), who pays flinty Mary first to take him fossilhunting and then to look after Charlotte for a few weeks while he trots about Europe. Maybe the sea air will blow away her “melancholia”? Lee imagines these two women, both fossilised by the patriarchy, bringing each other back to flesh-and-blood life, and their love scenes introduce jolts of
passion after ascetic shots of dour skies, grey waves and slow, crunchy treks along stony shores.
Like God’s Own Country, Ammonite (the name of a spiral fossil) is a sensory experience that embraces naturalism as the action unfolds in a punishing landscape – though here the images are more self-consciously composed and less immediate than those of Lee’s debut. Perhaps he is mirroring his heroines’ stasis, or is he being too respectful of period-drama conventions even as he shatters them elsewhere? Whatever the answer, this is thoughtful, artful cinema, beautifully performed by its two leads. Jamie Graham