Failure to launch
Perfect actors star in imperfect movie about an awkward wedding night
Set very squarely in 1962 Britain — a couple of years before the decade found its swing — On Chesil Beach tells the story of newlyweds who tragically can’t figure out what to do with each other on their wedding night. They’re not sure how to get the mood right. Trouble is, that’s the problem with the film as well.
Ian McEwan has adapted the screenplay from his own novella — unusual for a writer whose works are generally worked on by others (see Atonement, Enduring Love).
We first meet Edward and Florence (Billy Howle, Saoirse Ronan, both excellent) on the day of their wedding, as they share a meal in a seaside hotel and talk about nothing so as to avoid talking about anything.
Flashbacks give us their meeting, courtship and romance. All of it pretty standard stuff. Except that— this being the time and place and class that it is — the notion of anything other than light kissing and petting is off the menu.
So every time we return to the hotel and its looming bedstead, we’re painfully aware they have no idea what comes next.
“You may kiss my vibrato,” she tries gamely (she’s a classical violinist) before things go disastrously wrong — or at least, that’s how they see it. By 21st-century standards, it’s a mild matter of mistiming to which both overreact wildly.
There are some note-perfect scenes throughout the drama. In a bit lifted from the book, Florence reads a sex manual, its off-putting description of things coming off like a cross between a medical journal and a rather blasé soccer play-by-play.
Dominic Cooke, already a stage and small-screen director, does a good job with the setting. You can really feel the sense of Britain both on the cusp of massive social upheaval — and yet completely unaware of what’s about to hit it.
But the musical choices — mostly classical and including Bach’s cello suite prelude that you find in 37 per cent of all movies ever made — are a bit on the nose. I longed for a little more period rock ’n’ roll, or even some rock from the near future (though when a 1970s hit from T. Rex kicked in it turned out to be merely a signal that we were skipping forward in time). And this is where a few just-forthe-movie scenes do the story
its greatest disservice. It’s not enough to derail the film completely.
The young actors (who also played star-crossed lovers in this year’s The Seagull) are perfect in their portrayal of the complex mix of anger and love and confusion and betrayal that threatens to be their undoing.
There’s no performance anxiety from these two, even if the film as a whole fails to rise to the occasion.