Ammonite film review. A film that follows love from an icy stone to a blossoming flower
Ammonite closed the London Film Festival 2020, suitably so as it is the second film from British director Francis Lee whose earlier film Gods Own Country (2017) got great reviews. It tells the story of a young sheep farmer in Yorkshire whose life is up ended by a male Romanian migrant worker. Love is in the country air. In Ammonite, love is in the sea air. Both films take their landscape seriously but do not go for that area of outstanding beauty cinematography. Ammonite’s austere look fades as love grows. The film seems to get brighter in colour and takes on a giddy mood. It is the 1840’s, arriving to a coastal town, Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan) accompanied by her husband Roderick (James McArdle). He believes the sea air will raise her mood which is melancholic following a miscarriage. While the coastal town is not on the same level of gloom as Bela Tarr’s Damnation it does have a grey sky and stony beach. The perfect place for fossil hunter Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) who works stoically alone to find ammonite on the beach. We learn she made discoveries in the past with one of her stones placed in the British Museum to this day. This film Is not bio film of the fossil hunter Mary Anning but an appropriation of her life as the basis for Francis Lee’s film. For the real story of Mary Anning Rocks the New Scientist magazine tells readers that “it uses Anning as a vessel. It could have been any two women in this romance. There’s actually extraordinarily little palaeontology.” If we are honest as viewers, we did not come to this film for the palaeontology but to see Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan tell a story that is stone cold to start but get very warm as it goes on.
The film is by no means a Mills and Boone love affair it does though rest on cliches. There are the opposites attract, one young the other older, difference in social class, and one from the city the other the rural coastline. It does subvert these with a love affair between two women Love which does not blossom straight away but later in the film it explodes. The atmosphere in the film for part of the time is sparse in a Scandinavian way, slender amounts of dialogue with sounds in the background adding to the scenes. The sound of a door closing stands out. Believe me this film has noticeably big doors. The best sounds are that of the sea and wind summoning up the film’s atmosphere.
The film the longer it goes on loses power the more the love affair blossoms, and it becomes less interesting. The hard yards of the first sixty minutes of the film are the most interesting. The sex scene when it arrives between Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison is when the kettle has fully boiled on a freezing day near the seaside. The scene is effective because of the build-up but it is what we would have expected. More subtle but no less interesting is the interplay between Mary and pillar of the town (Lyme Regis if you are asking) Mrs Phillpot played by Fiona Shaw who seems older than Mary? Each scene between them is brilliantly charged while the dialogue does not betray them the looks, they give other do, implying that once they too were intimately enthusiastic with one another.
Francis Lee has crafted film that has a sense of place and benefits from a great cast, but this is a film that follows love from an icy stone to a blossoming flower. I would have preferred more stone.
.
