![]() ![]() (It’s hinted she may have lost a child.) Roderick leaves town but doesn’t take Charlotte with him. Roderick’s wife Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan) is ailing and depressed. Mary is visited by a gentleman scientist from London, Roderick Murchison (James McArdle), who pays to be allowed to observe her at work. Kate Winslet plays Mary Anning, a palaeontologist whose skills in finding fossils on the sea shore are admired by scientists (she is called “the presiding deity of Lyme Regis”) but who still lives in very humble circumstances with her ailing but ferocious mother, Molly ( Gemma Jones). Writer-director Francis Lee dealt with a same-sex love affair between a young Yorkshire man and a Romanian migrant worker in his very striking debut feature, God’s Own Country. Victorian-era Lyme Regis is back on screen in Francis Lee’s dark and intense romantic drama, Ammonite, which closed the London Film Festival at the weekend. What Ammonite needs is to dig deeper and imagine more - to find a Mary Anning of its own to excavate what’s hidden inside it.It’s almost 40 years since Meryl Streep strode forlornly along Lyme Regis’s storm-swept pier in a black shawl in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981). What we don’t get is a real sense of those inner chambers evoked by its title: a richer curiosity about the story’s own absences. It gives us what we ask for: the glimpses of voracious, exploratory sex between these women, the reminders of the limits that make their love impossible to imagine, the complicated gazes such women throw one another in lieu of saying aloud what cannot be said. And the movie is designed, almost too conspicuously, to appeal to an audience that wants this above all else. Still, it’s a plain and inarguable fact that we all deserve a movie in which Winslet and Ronan, specialists in complex women, play unlikely lovers whose bonnets are just itching to get ripped off. It’s ironic, in the end, when she reveals herself to be, among other things, a woman who refuses to be contained. Yet the character feels just as constrained by the formula of period-piece, forbidden-love stories as by the social context of the times. Even as the movie makes her arc somewhat predictable, the slow but sure softening of Mary’s demeanor toward Charlotte is a pleasure to watch. Winslet is given the job of playing both the daughter of this formative matriarch and an incredibly intelligent, starkly suppressed woman living in a regressive era. She’s given a steely possessiveness that inspires curiosities about her, and really every woman here, that the movie disappointingly underexplores. Those blue eyes of hers, as brash and brutal as Lyme Regis’s shore, cut through the screen - and through us. ![]() Ronan is dependably strong, taking a slightly underwritten character and giving her unexpected substance. But even more than the landscape, his follow-up belongs to its actors. Love in a hopeless place is his specialty. With his 2017 feature debut God’s Own Country, about a Yorkshire farmer and a Romanian migrant worker passionately rolling in the deep, Lee has already carved out a filmmaking lane for himself as a chronicler of the hidden desires budding amid the most ashen, forbidding nooks of England. In a way, Ammonite is like a bit of prestige fan fiction, awards-season “shipping” of the kind that queer Star Wars fans dream up about Poe and Finn. So much of queer history has been rendered invisible by social norms that only our imaginations, supplanted by rare fragments of truth, can fill in those gaps. The question is, were they lovers? The historical record doesn’t tell us - but, then there’s a lot that history doesn’t tell us. That in itself proves an interesting bullet point.
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