It might be time to retire the period lesbian romantic drama.
No doubt this cinematic subgenre that has arisen in recent years centering on forbidden romances between women in less enlightened times has produced great movies, among them Todd Haynes’ exceptional Carol and Park Chan-wook’s thrilling The Handmaiden. But at the same time it’s gotten tedious and in short order become just another cliché of movies vaguely trying to be Oscar-bait. And of course they almost always star heterosexual women in the homosexual roles: Vita & Virginia, Tell It to the Bees, Wild Nights with Emily, Colette, and most recently Summerland. Kira Deshler wrote a great article for Screen Queens on this phenomenon and why it’s become tiresome. And personally I believe the genre clearly hit its apex with Portrait of a Lady on Fire -no lesbian period drama can follow that and compare.
Unfortunately, Ammonite has no choice but to follow it, and so from the start it’s an uphill battle for Francis Lee’s movie about the nineteenth century British paleontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and her love affair with one Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), the wife of a fan. It’s especially difficult given how much the film resembles Portrait of a Lady on Fire in not only both plot and characterization but particular details, to the point I might accuse the film of copying notes had it entered production after the premiere of Celine Sciamma’s film -and I’m still a tad suspicious anyway. It’s the story about two women, one of whom is put in the care of the other while her husband is away, one is deeply introverted and antisocial, and they both spend a lot of time on the beach. There are also small things like Mary sketching Charlotte while she sleeps, or a scene of Charlotte embroidering on a hoop, or a late film visit to an art gallery that all feel a little too specific to be coincidental. The plot and relationship progression (at least in theory) is also more or less the same as the aforementioned film, but all around much poorer by comparison. Francis Lee has only one previous directing credit, a similar gay-themed drama called God’s Own Country, and while his work has respectable attributes, he’s clearly an unpolished filmmaker, and though his narrative tells us otherwise, is afraid to let his characters come out of their ammonite shells.
Winslet and Ronan are both incredible actresses but Ammonite is not a terribly good showcase for either of them. Winslet fares better as the reserved, humourless Mary, though she undergoes no significant change by Charlotte’s presence in her life -at least not outwardly as the movie seems to believe. And Ronan just appears lost most of the time, unsure of her direction; while Charlotte undergoes more of a transformation, she’s still pretty underdeveloped, spending a lot of the first act of the film recuperating from an ailment and a trauma we learn nothing about. And the two actresses have little chemistry, fatal for a love story. There’s no real passion to their affair, only a subdued sexual tension, and a completely absent relationship dynamic (this at least is acknowledged later in the film), all of which makes their inevitable and surprisingly explicit sex scene, the peak of their romance, rather emotionally hollow and honestly awkward to watch. Of course, this might be more on the script (by all accounts Winslet and Ronan had great off-screen chemistry), which takes a minimalist approach to the whole narrative. The level of dialogue in this film is actually surprisingly sparse, as though Lee hopes to convey the growth of their relationship through the pairs’ acting, the editing, the framing, and so forth. But none of these disciplines are capable of carrying the displaced weight, and the result is a romance largely devoid of life, where Mary’s infatuation is cautiously hinted at and Charlotte’s just kind of springs up fully formed.
The metaphor the film may be attempting to evoke here is one of erosion, and the gradual work of unearthing fossils. Plenty of scenes see Marry chipping away at rocks or meandering along the stony beach searching for the titular ammonite often found on the Jurassic coast. And it’s not hard to see the relationship she develops with Charlotte as a reflection of this process. It’s clever, but it doesn’t make for a good story choice. In fact I would have preferred more of the actual paleontology. In one of the better scenes, she’s excavating the beach with Roderick Murchison (James McArdle), explaining to him what the various fossilized rocks tell -and to his credit, he listens respectfully. It really does convey why Mary Anning was a remarkable woman, whose scientific accomplishments, like those of so many other women of her time, have been overlooked or forgotten next to her male peers. But unlike Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Ammonite has no interest in confronting that social order. Mary tells a story at one point about digging up the first ever discovered icthyosaur skull when she was very young and how it paid her familys’ rent for a month. It’s a fascinating story, clearly one of several over her career that might have made for more compelling movies than this one that Lee made up -there’s no evidence suggesting this relationship or even that Mary was homosexual to begin with.
Outside of the romance, the film dwells occasionally on the lingering impact of a failed affair Mary had had with another paleontologist, Elizabeth Philpot, played by Fiona Shaw, as well as the unrequited affections towards her by Charlotte’s doctor (Alec Secăreanu), and her dismal relationship with her mother (Gemma Jones, who’d also played Winslet’s mother twenty-five years ago in Sense and Sensibility). But these diversions aren’t especially interesting either, excepting for a sequence at a magic lantern show in which Mary seems jealous and possibly concerned with the attention Philpot gives Charlotte. This anxiety too ought to have been expanded upon.
Ammonite has a lot of ingredients of a really good romantic drama, but refuses to use them. I think I understand why but I don’t agree. In many ways it is exactly the movie everyone tired of these gay period pieces expects it to be -all it’s missing is the extravagant homophobia. And once again, there’s just no escaping that even the elements of the movie that are genuinely good and remarkable in other contexts, are so much stronger in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the variation of this story that dwarfs all others, that there’s no reason to see this film over that. Let’s give new lesbian stories a chance.
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