I probably haven't prioritized it sooner, even with its availability on Kanopy, because then I thought "If it were the next Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I'd have heard a lot more people talking about it."
Ammonite does, though, make a great final of my four weekly LGBTQI+ viewings for Pride Month this June, especially since it bookends with Wilde, both qualifying as gay romances set in the historical past -- this one a good 50 years before that one.
And even though it boasts two Oscar nominees in Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet -- the latter having actually taken home a statue -- Ammonite proves that a similar time period, similar rocky coastal setting and similar subject matter are not enough to conjure the distinct alchemy of ingredients that makes a masterpiece like Celine Sciamma's film.
And that's okay -- Ammonite should be content just to be very good.
The film, set around 1850 it would seem, features Winslet as Mary Anning, a slightly older -- compared to her paramour anyway -- woman living in Lyme, Dorset, who specialises in digging fossils out of the cliffside and filing away the extra dirt and mud to reveal only the scientific discovery left behind. She is indeed a scientist by nature, though to pay the bills she has to sell these ammonite treasures to collectors on the high end of the scale, tourists on the low end. Her shop also features cheaper, as in less scientifically significant, products like mirrors lined with seashells.
It's a fairly grumpy and solitary existence -- she has a little support, though not very lively support, from her mother (Gemma Jones), who is also her roommate -- but it leaves Mary contented enough. It's evident from her pained interactions with a former lover played by Fiona Shaw that she never expected to have a man around, and that any of her own children were then obviously out of the question.
Her routine is jolted by the arrival of a gentleman (James McArdle) who wants to observe Mary in her work as his own form of scientific exploration, and is willing to pay her for it. His wife Charlotte (Ronan) is recovering from the shock of losing a child -- we can assume based on only very minimal evidence in the dialogue -- and is rarely fit enough to get out of bed. When he's called back to London for an expected period of six weeks, he offers to further compensate Mary if she'll take Charlotte out with her, as the sea air and companionship will do her good. And if you saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire, you can guess what happens from there.
Francis Lee's film is not nearly the swooningly romantic film that Sciamma's is, though it makes up for that in fairly graphic love scenes, especially considering the high profile of these actresses. Still, it convinces us easily of the development of intense feelings between the two women, both recovering from a sort of trauma, holding on to the other as a sort of life preserver. Winslet and Ronan are capable of expressing an untold number of internal ruminations just through a few flicks of their facial features, and it's a joy to watch them work with each other. They develop a palpable chemistry, but also a tremendous respect for one another. Their union is certainly opportunistic in nature on both halves, but it's not exploitative. They come together mutually, rather than either taking advantage of the other's fragile state.
I was also interested to see Lee explore the conflict between love and Mary's professional pursuits. At the time this was set, the idea that any woman would pursue anything professionally was absurd, and yet Mary thinks progressively enough that she balks at the idea of sacrificing her career, even if it means closer proximity to the woman she loves.
I further enjoyed this being the only of the four movies I watched where the characters' sexuality is not specifically a point of societal outrage. Surely side characters in this film suspect what is going on between Mary and Charlotte, but there never needs to be a scene where one or both of them is dragged out into the town square and flogged, metaphorically or otherwise, for engaging in sins of which proper citizens can barely speak. This really is just a love story between two people, and the fact of their same gender is almost incidental.
And perhaps that is a fitting note on which to end a month of movies whose underlying goal, for all else they may set out to accomplish, is to help normalize same gender romance for as much of society as possible.
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