Sailing the seas of love

Saoirse Ronan shines in elegant if choppy retelling of a 1960s-set tale

ON CHESIL BEACH (15) ***

Dir: Dominic Cooke

With: Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle, Emily Watson

Runtime: 110 minutes

AYOUNG couple, dressed in their wedding day best, walk hand in hand along a shore. It is England, 1962. Not too hot, not too cold. There is chatter, laughter, camaraderie. Hardly the stuff of watch through your fingers cinema, you might think.

But in this tale, adapted from the novel by Ian McEwan, it is not just the sea that has hidden depths. As we see later, there are some treacherous stretches for filmmakers besides.

Florence and Edward (Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle) have come to the seaside fresh from the ceremony. Their next task is to have dinner a deux in their hotel room, served by a pair of waiters who hang around to provide silver service. It is horribly awkward, but it is the done thing apparently, and the two youngsters are very keen on the done thing, even if it is farcical.

“It was beautiful,” says Edward, recalling the wedding day. “Nothing went wrong,” agrees his new wife. The solemn ceremonies over, the sniggering waiters gone, the couple can now relax. Even though this is the Macmillan era, and sex has not yet been invented, we assume they will muddle through.

This is the point from which the tale begins proper. As the evening unfolds, director Dominic Cooke, working from a screenplay by McEwan, goes back and forth from past to present, filling in some blanks and leaving others to the audience’s imagination.

This first half of the story is delightfully done, with Cooke and his cast recreating the looks, mores and class tensions of the time. Edward is the son of a country headmaster and an ex-curator mother (Anne-Marie Duff). He has no money but he does now have a first-class degree in history. Florence has a first, too, in music. She lives in a very smart house in London with a family who eat mangetout and an academic mother (Emily Watson) who has telephone conversations with Iris Murdoch. The music by Dan Jones is excellent, moving the tale seamlessly back and forth across the years.

Different lives, different times, but as we have seen in flashback, young love has conquered all and taken the couple