Monthly Archives: April 2021

  • Ammonite

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Francis Lee (2020)

    At the heart of Ammonite is a lesbian relationship, between Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan).  Both were real people; their affair and their sexuality are speculation on the part of writer-director Francis Lee – speculation that, of course, is proving controversial.  Defending his interpretation on Twitter, Lee asks, ‘After seeing queer history be routinely “straightened” throughout culture, and given a historical figure where there is no evidence whatsoever of a heterosexual relationship, is it not permissible to view that person within another context?’

    The palaeontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847) was born and died in Lyme Regis, Dorset, and spent virtually her whole life there.  She collected fossils in marine beds on the Jurassic Coast.  Her finds (most often, ammonites) included the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton.  Anning became internationally well known in geological circles but, as a woman and a Dissenter, was prevented from fully participating in the English scientific community of the time.  She succeeded her parents in running the family’s fossil-dealing business but the Annings were never financially well off.   Mary became better known publicly after her death:  she was, for example, the subject of an 1855 article by Dickens in his All the Year Round magazine.  In time, her work came to be recognised as influential on scientific theories of prehistoric life and geology.

    At the start of Ammonite, unmarried Mary leads a settled and secluded existence, scouring the beach and cliffs for fossils, running the specimen shop and business.  Outside shop opening hours, she has only her mother, Molly (Gemma Jones), for company.  Geologist Roderick Murchison (James McArdle), visiting Lyme Regis with his young wife Charlotte, asks Mary for a (paid) guided tour of the beach and she reluctantly agrees.  She does the same when Roderick, about to leave on a six-week research trip to continental Europe, asks her to look after the convalescent Charlotte in his absence.  Mary accepts both requests for the same reason:  she and Molly could use the cash.  After bathing in the sea, Charlotte falls seriously ill with a fever.  Dr Lieberson (Alec Secăreanu), the physician called in to examine her, asks Mary to nurse the patient, and she does an excellent job.

    Her friendship with the recovered Charlotte develops in the course of daily fossil-hunting outings and time on the beach.  When the Annings’ house guest first moves in, Mary gives up her bed and sleeps in a chair.  At Charlotte’s suggestion, they start sharing the bed and the relationship becomes sexual.  A letter from Charlotte’s husband arrives, instructing her to return to London – which she does, after a night of passionate love-making with Mary.  Some while later, Mary (whose mother has now died) receives an invitation from Charlotte and travels to London by boat.  She’s welcomed into the Murchisons’ fine house by an excited Charlotte, who shows her a furnished bedroom, adjoining her own, for Mary to move into permanently.  Appalled by the prospect of what she sees as bird-in-a-gilded-cage captivity, far from home, Mary angrily refuses.  She makes her way to the British Museum.  Past the portraits of eminent male antiquarians lining the walls, she finds ‘her’ ichthyosaurus on display.  There’s nothing on the exhibit case to indicate who discovered the skeleton.

    A question about the film less rhetorical than the one from Francis Lee quoted above:  why didn’t he fictionalise his main characters to the extent of giving them invented names?  That last detail in the British Museum in effect supplies the answer.  Lee chose not to conceal the real-life identity of his story’s inspiration because he wanted to make widely known to a modern audience both Mary Anning’s scientific achievements and her marginalisation by the scientific patriarchy of her day.  The consequences of his retaining Charlotte Murchison’s name are another matter.  She was actually eleven years older than Anning and, according to Mary Somerville, ‘an amiable accomplished woman, [who] drew prettily and – what was rare at the time – she had studied science, especially geology, and it was chiefly owing to her example that her husband turned his mind to those pursuits in which he afterwards obtained such distinction’.  You wouldn’t know any of that from Ammonite, which presents Charlotte, eventually, as a jejune and self-centred young lady.  Lee reduces the standing that she actually enjoyed in her lifetime.  He finally disparages Charlotte because he wants to show Mary Anning as disadvantaged not only by gender and the sexual preferences he imagines her to have had, but also by her class.

    The first hour of Ammonite loses no opportunity to illustrate automatic male chauvinism.  In the opening sequence, a woman is strenuously washing a floor in the British Museum; a man’s voice orders her out of the way so that what turns out to be Mary’s ichthyosaur skeleton can be carried past.  At dinner in Lyme Regis, Roderick Murchison orders himself oysters, beef with all the trimmings, claret and, for his wife – without asking her (and before it’s been made clear that she’s recovering from ill health) – ‘plain white fish, baked, no sauce’.  In their bed at the hotel, as Charlotte moves close to him, he brusquely informs her it’s too soon to try for another baby.  (We assume she lost the first.)  Depicting him as pompous and uncaring serves Lee’s purpose in another way:  it obscures the improbability of Murchison’s foisting his wife on Mary for the duration of his foreign travels.  Dr Lieberson, who then takes over as virtually the only male in the film, is a much more courteous chap.  But he is a chap:  even he, on his first visit to Charlotte’s bedside, reminds Mary that, ‘It is a woman’s position to care for her fellow sister, is it not?’

    Once Charlotte is better, she persuades a man haggling to buy a specimen from Mary that the latter’s asking price is reasonable – there’s a hint here that Charlotte’s social standing leaves her better placed than Mary to insist on a fairer deal.  Molly is suspicious of their lodger and resents how little her husband is paying for Charlotte’s keep.  Otherwise, class distinctions don’t figure except in Michael O’Connor’s skilfully differentiated costume design and, perhaps, at the musical soirée to which Lieberson invites Mary, an invitation she accepts only on condition that Charlotte accompany her there.  This episode is confusingly staged, though (more below).  The emphasis suddenly changes with Mary’s arrival at Charlotte’s house – now the class points come thick and fast.  A maid (Wendy Nottingham) opens the door, directs Mary to the tradesman’s entrance, and is clearly surprised to learn that the personage on the doorstep is her mistress’s guest.  Mary is uneasy about snogging in the servant’s presence but Charlotte assures her ‘it’s only the maid’.  Charlotte’s intention that Mary live in her house – Roderick, she says, won’t mind:  he’s too wrapped up in his geology – is a startling expression of entitlement, especially since Charlotte had seemed to have a sensitive understanding of Mary’s personality and priorities.  In Lee’s closing shot, Mary looks up from the case containing the icthyosaurus to see Charlotte standing on its other side, and gazing at her.  If a glass ceiling denies Mary the scientific esteem she deserves, a glass case of class difference appears to separate her from Charlotte.

    The eleventh-hour lurch in the film’s view of Charlotte is dramatically counterproductive.  As Sally said after we’d watched Ammonite, its climax might be less unconvincing if Charlotte were shown to be apprehensive about Mary’s reaction to the idea of moving in.  That at least would credit Charlotte with recognising her lover’s suspicious, intransigent side, and fearing her proposition could bring it into play.  Instead, Charlotte merely assumes that what she wants Mary must want too, and can’t believe her offer is rejected (she’s struck dumb by Mary’s blunt exit line, ‘I wish you’d told me before – could have saved the boat fare’).  This abrupt condemnation of Charlotte is the more jarring with Saoirse Ronan in the role.  As always, her acting is nuanced and she exudes keen intelligence.  Lee’s change of heart leaves Ronan stranded:  its clumsiness is laid bare by one’s unaccustomed loss of belief in what this fine actress is doing.

    At the start, Kate Winslet tends to overdo her character’s gruff taciturnity:   every line emerges grudgingly – to make clear that Mary prefers to keep herself entirely to herself.  Winslet is always physically impressive, though.  Her Mary is a sturdy figure, somewhat mannish in her bearing; the idea that she wears a mask to the world has more impact through being expressed in Winslet’s naturally open face.  As Mary’s feelings for Charlotte grow and amplify, the voice starts to strike more notes too.  It’s another good performance from Winslet, who isn’t winning awards for Ammonite but deserves a medal for committing to the fossil-hunting sequences – for instance, when the great effort of extracting a specimen from the cliff-face sends her sliding painfully down to earth.  The image of prising important material out of rock is central to Lee’s picture of the arduous nature of his protagonist’s existence.  Later on, even the removal of unwieldy clothing feels like a hard job.

    One of Kate Winslet’s most telling gestures comes in Mary’s visit to a local woman, Elizabeth Philpot (Fiona Shaw), to get a jar of salve for Charlotte, while she’s still confined to bed.  Elizabeth doesn’t want payment for the salve and hands Mary’s money back.  Stubborn Mary, as she replaces the coins into Elizabeth’s palm and folds her fingers over it, firmly gains the upper hand.  ‘Plus ça change,’ Elizabeth murmurs regretfully, as Mary takes her leave.  Elizabeth Philpot also was a real person, palaeontologist and friend of Mary Anning, enough for Lee to make clear they too once were lovers.  After Molly’s death, Elizabeth calls to offer her condolences and urge Mary not to abandon her relationship with Charlotte (now back in London):  it seems that Mary put an end to the romance with Elizabeth in the aftermath of Mary’s father’s death.

    These scenes featuring Elizabeth work well enough but her behaviour at the recital left me puzzled.  Mary, with Charlotte, stands apart from the rest of the gathering; when Lieberson insists on introducing them to Elizabeth et al, Mary quickly exits to powder her nose.  By the time she returns, Charlotte is the centre of attention, or Elizabeth’s attention anyway.  They sit side by side for the performance, with Mary miserably isolated at the back of the room.  She soon leaves and trudges home in pouring rain.  Elizabeth is evidently middle class:  I wasn’t sure if Lee meant to show Charlotte jumping at the chance to be with people socially of her own kind or that Elizabeth has graciously predatory designs on the younger woman.  She certainly takes charge – Charlotte could hardly extricate herself even if she wanted to.  But what dominates the scene’s closing stages is that Elizabeth and Charlotte, unlike everyone else present, carry on talking to each other once the music starts.  One waits in vain for someone to shut them up.

    There’s a lot that Lee does well.  As in God’s Own Country, he roots the action in a physical and emotional context that is strongly realised, visually and aurally.  Greys and matt blues predominate until the scene in Elizabeth Philpot’s cottage garden, the suddenness of sunshine and flowers there suggesting a possibility of ease and pleasure that Mary determinedly abstains from.  Stéphane Fontaine’s lighting is meticulous throughout, the camerawork dramatic without being ostentatious – not least in the extended shot of Mary’s watching Charlotte’s carriage, as she leaves Lyme Regis, disappear into the distance.  The expressive sound design includes not just the noise of the sea and of footsteps on shingle but also scratching – of Mary’s pen in the shop ledger, even of the fabric of her clothes.  The Annings’ domestic routines are captured economically and vividly – especially Molly’s regular cleaning of her collection of animal fairings that she calls her babies.  (They represent the eight children she gave birth to, who died in infancy:  only Mary and one of the sons lived to be adults.)   For the most part, Lee directs his high-powered actors with skill and care.  James McArdle inevitably can’t do much with his dismissively written role but Gemma Jones and Alec Secăreanu are both very effective.

    Those two were also in the cast of God’s Own Country and there’s a particular moment in Ammonite that brings Francis Lee’s previous film to mind.  When Charlotte is ill and Dr Lieberson arrives Molly gives him a furious stare, asking if he’s new and if he’s foreign (he admits to being both).  In God’s Own Country, Lee, rather cunningly, often made it unclear whether the local community’s homophobia or its xenophobia was the bigger threat to the love between Josh O’Connor’s young Yorkshire farmer and Secăreanu’s Romanian farm hand.  Did Lee in this new film perhaps mean to achieve a similar blending and blurring of Victorian prejudices around gender, sexuality and class?  If so, he didn’t succeed so well.  Ammonite is constructed more as a relay, the baton passed from one prejudice to the next; one’s left with the feeling that Lee hadn’t enough material to concentrate either on the sexual relationship or on showing how Mary Anning’s recognition as a scientist was thwarted by her being a woman lacking social distinction.  The result is a kind of same-sex-romance sandwich.  Thanks to Lee’s relatively heavy-handed touch with patriarchy and privilege, it’s a bit of a doorstop sandwich.

    13 April 2021

  • Sir

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rohena Gera (2018)

    In its economical, unassertive way, Sir (on Netflix) builds to a powerful critique of Indian social hierarchy.  (As such, it’s much superior to the more recent, flashier and overlong The White Tiger.)   Set mostly in present-day Mumbai, writer-director Rohena Gara’s romantic drama is also a fine, involving character study – of its heroine, Ratna (Tillotama Shome), and its title character, Ashwin (Vivek Gomber).  At the start of the film, Ratna leaves the village home of her mother and younger sister to return to Mumbai, where she’s employed by Ashwin’s mother (Divya Seth Shah), to keep house – sleek apartment, that is – for her son.  Ratna’s return to work is sudden and unexpected.  She’d been on a few days’ leave, staying with her family, while Ashwin was getting married.  On what should have been his wedding day, he’s come back to his apartment after leaving his bride Sabina at the altar.

    Gera loses no time starting to build a picture of the master-servant relationship and its implications.  Ratna is a live-in maid, whose room is on the other side of the wall from Ashwin’s.  His bedroom is spacious; hers gives new force of meaning to the term box room, especially after Sabina’s driver (Saharsh Kumar Shukla) arrives with a consignment of large, gift-wrapped packages – unopened wedding presents.  These are stored – out of sight out of mind, as far as Ashwin is concerned – in Ratna’s cubby hole.  In the first days after getting back, Ashwin, though restless and morose, is never rude to his factotum yet barely registers her presence as a person, as distinct from a regular supplier of meals and refreshment.  We see them both in their lives outside the apartment.  Ratna, who dreams of becoming a fashion designer, starts working for a local tailor two hours a day – the duration of her afternoon break from housekeeping, though she gets Ashwin’s permission before starting the other job.  It doesn’t last long:  she’d been hoping to learn how to make garments;  the tailor (Bachan Pachera), knowing Ratna’s a servant, gives her only menial jobs – clearing up, running errands – to do.  She subsequently enrols on a sewing course instead.  Ashwin is an architect, working for the family firm.  A couple of short scenes on a building site give us a sense of tensions between him and his father (Rahul Vohra), the company boss.

    From early on too, Gera supplies background on her principals succinctly and naturally.  Ashwin’s sister Nandita (Dilnaz Irani) thinks her brother called off his wedding because Sabina had had a fling with someone else.  Not so, says Ashwin:  he didn’t want Sabina enough; because she sensed this she looked elsewhere; he reckons he doesn’t want a long-term commitment.  Ratna, serving drinks, overhears this conversation and it makes sense that she does:  since she’s a nobody, Ashwin and Nandita can talk as if she weren’t there.  Concerned that Ashwin can’t seem to shake off his low spirits, Ratna nevertheless plucks up the courage to tell him of her own marital history.  She had wanted to study beyond secondary school but her parents insisted she wed a local man.  He died four months after their wedding, leaving Ratna a widow at nineteen.  Her family agreed to her coming to Mumbai because that meant one less mouth to feed.  We learn from the same conversation that Ashwin had been living in New York City, trying to forge a career as a writer, when ‘my brother was diagnosed’ and he returned to India.  He doesn’t expand on those four words in quotes but they’re enough to chime with the tetchy atmosphere between Ashwin and his father.

    It’s no surprise, of course, that Ratna and Ashwin develop romantic feelings for each other but the context and the way in which this happens are distinctive.  Here are two good-looking, unattached people of a similar age (mid- to late thirties) living in close proximity, and, post-Sabina, with no one else in the place.  (Sabina’s driver bluntly tells Ratna that she’ll obviously have to start looking for a different posting.)  Their feelings don’t develop at the same pace; Ratna and Ashwin view these feelings differently, according to their different status.  Not only is she drawn to him sooner than he to her; she also seems ready to encourage greater conversational intimacy thanks to the sheer impossibility of there being any other kind of closeness between two people far apart on the social scale.  Ratna is offended and forthright when she thinks Ashwin is making fun of her ambitions in fashion design.  But when she gives him as a birthday present a shirt that she’s made, she’s shocked that he immediately wears it to work – as if publicly exposing her private affection for him.  She anxiously pleads with him not to tell anyone who gave him the garment.

    Ashwin always shows her a degree of courtesy quite lacking in the treatment of Ratna by other, affluent women in his life – his mother, his sister, the glamorous Ankita (Anupriya Goenka), who’s a guest at a party in his apartment.  When Ratna accidentally spills wine on her dress, Ankita yells expletives at her and, as Ashwin tries to calm things, informs him that she knows from experience how to deal with ‘fucking idiots’ of servants.  Ashwin’s quiet reply that it’s therefore a good job Ratna doesn’t work for her only inflames the situation.  He’s prepared, then, to stand up for his obliging, competent maid but coming to see her as anything more is a very gradual process.  Once Ashwin realises how his view of her is changing, he’s well aware that his friends and family won’t stand for it, and is himself ambivalent.  Yet his sense of entitlement allows him to think of a relationship with Ratna in a way she can’t – as a potential reality.

    The difference between them is most poignantly expressed when Ratna has briefly returned to her village and Ashwin calls her there.  Most of Ratna’s wages in Mumbai are used to fund the college education of Choti (Bhagyashree Pandit), her younger sister.  For her part, Choti is merely envious of her big sister’s life in the big city, and wants to get there too.  Ratna is angry to learn that Choti is getting married, and ready to give up her studies, in order to move to Mumbai with her husband.  She nevertheless asks Ashwin for leave to attend Choti’s wedding.  She’s astonished to receive his phone call.  They chat, pleasantly though uncertainly, for a few seconds before Ratna asks if Ashwin wants something.  He can’t just be calling to talk to her – there must be some chore he needs her to do.  Yet his answer is no.

    When Ashwin buys Ratna a fashion magazine, it’s by way of apology for having seemed to belittle her career hopes:  he assures her everyone in the fashion business reads the magazine.  His later present of a sewing machine, though more significant, hardly breaks the bounds of propriety but Ratna finds it increasingly hard to subdue her unutterable feelings.  Ashwin goes out to a bar with his (male) friend Vicky (Chandrachoor Rai) and brings a girl home.  Ratna encounters her emerging from Ashwin’s bedroom next morning; shocked, she dutifully brings the glass of water that the girl requests.  A pivotal shift in relations with Ashwin occurs during the Ganesh festival.  Ratna is dancing with her older friend Laxmi (Geetanjali Kulkarni), who is also a maid, just outside the apartment block when Ashwin returns home.  Declining an invitation to join the dance, he enters the building and Ratna follows.  ‘You believe in God, then?’ he jokes.  ‘I have to believe, sir,’ she replies, not joking.  In the apartment she’s perspiring from her exertions outside.  Ashwin can’t resist taking her in his arms.

    This is virtually the kiss of death for the relationship.  While Ashwin wants to persuade himself they have a future together, Ratna knows better.  She won’t even, as he keeps requesting her to do, call him Ashwin, rather than ‘sir’.  (First shown in critics’ week at Cannes in 2018, the film was released in India with the alternative English title, Is Love Enough Sir? – which is a travesty of its emotional complexity.)  An upsetting scene at Ashwin’s parents’ home vindicates her – as it does Vicky, who has reminded his friend, candidly but not unkindly, that someone like Ratna doesn’t even use cutlery.  She’s one of four servants working at Ashwin’s mother’s party.  On their break, they sit on the kitchen floor, using fingers to eat their food.  Ashwin interrupts to ask Ratna if he should wait to give her a lift back; she says no.  Once he’s left the kitchen, one of the male servants sarcastically asks Ratna, ‘Do you want me to wait for you?’  When she does return to the apartment, she angrily tells Ashwin of this humiliation.  Soon afterwards, she packs her bags.  Assuring Ashwin that she’ll find another job and doesn’t need any financial help, she takes her leave and goes to stay with her sister and brother-in-law, who are now in Mumbai.  (Choti’s husband has agreed to let her continue her studies but their drab, poky surroundings are already dispelling her illusions of the glamour of city living.)

    ‘If you care anything about her, you’ll keep your distance,’ Vicky tells Ashwin.  Although Ratna takes action on that first, he soon follows.  He explains to his father that he’s not in a relationship with Ratna but that he loves her,  He has therefore decided to return to America to live:  just as well in the circumstances, his father replies.  Since Ashwin’s departure is, at the very least, inconvenient for his father’s business, that terse response is an incisive comment on the magnitude of the social scandal that’s being avoided (though it’s a pity we don’t get to see Ashwin’s mother’s reaction too).  Some time after he’s gone, Ratna is invited to an interview with a clothes designer who turns out to be Ankita.  They exchange apologies for the wine incident – Ratna nervously, Ankita breezily.  When she gets the job she has long hankered after Ratna knows who she has to thank for it.  This plot twist sounds pat but I don’t think it is.  Ashwin is determined to do something for Ratna, and in a socially acceptable way.  It makes sense that their exchange at the party caused no lasting damage to his friendship with Ankita – who is too smart to let a spat with a servant stop her from exploiting Ratna’s talent.

    Now in her late forties, Rohena Gera wrote for Indian cinema and television some years ago, and in 2013 made a documentary, What’s Love Got to Do with It? (to quote an IMDb note, ‘an amusing portrayal of privileged urban Indians coming to terms with expectations about love, marriage, happiness and tradition’).  Sir, her first non-fiction feature, has one of the best scripts I’ve come across in recent years.  (The dialogue is mostly in Hindi, with some English and Marathi.)  As a director, Gera has a touch that’s subtle and sure – for example, in the very occasional bursts of energy that contrast vitally with the glancing remarks and guarded looks dominating the narrative.  The Ganesh festival sequence features the second of two bouncy songs on the soundtrack.  Their upbeat, life-is-for-living lyrics seem facile (are easier said than done anyway) but their music is truly energising.  Ratna can lose herself in the festival dancing – just as Ashwin, in a game of squash with Vicky, can chase his blues away.

    I’ve seen Tillotama Shome before – playing another maid, in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001), where Shome made her screen debut – but confess I don’t remember her from that.  (I liked the film a lot but it’s years ago that I saw it.)   As Ratna, she’s impeccably good as a woman acutely aware of her social limitations but set on achieving a kind of independence.  Vivek Gomber, excellent in Court (2014), was awkward and seemed miscast in his buffoonish role in another Nair-directed piece, last year’s TV adaptation of A Suitable Boy, but Sir is a different matter.  It brings Gomber’s gift for telling understatement to the fore, and he’s first rate.  Both lead actors are physically very right.  Even as Ratna returns to Mumbai at the start, you see a quiet determination – almost a pride – in the way she carries herself.  As the story progresses, Ashwin often stands rooted to the spot.  It’s an expression of his powerlessness in the social system of which he’s part.

    Ratna is definite when they part company that she wants no further contact with Ashwin. Now, eager to thank him for recommending her to Ankita, she returns to his apartment to find the door padlocked.  She goes sadly up to the roof of the block, where she once talked with him, and looks out on the city.  Her phone rings.  This final call, even shorter than the one Ratna received while with her family for Choti’s wedding, is no less perfectly judged.  When she picks up Ashwin’s voice says, ‘Hello, Ratna?’   Her one-word reply, after a long pause, addresses him, for the first and only time, by name instead of status.  It’s a perfect ending to a splendid film but the effect of Sir, like that of many good movies before it, is to make you want to know how the people in it are doing now.

    7 April 2021

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