Film 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