On Chesil Beach
Dominic Cooke (2017)
‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three’, according to Philip Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, which its author has now adapted for the screen, is set in 1962. The pivotal event – or non-event – occurs on the wedding night of the two main characters, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, in a Dorset hotel close to the stretch of shingle from which McEwan’s novella takes its name. These honeymooners are recent university graduates. They’re also virgins. Edward, raised in rural Oxfordshire, is excited but even more nervous at the prospect of making love for the first time. Florence, the daughter of a businessman and an Oxford academic, has prepared for the occasion by reading a sex manual but is dreading the real thing well before Edward’s premature ejaculation, at which point her dread turns to horrified disgust. On Chesil Beach, the anguished newlyweds debate their predicament. Florence stresses how much she loves Edward, says she’ll never be able to cope with having sex, suggests that she won’t mind if her husband therefore looks to other women to satisfy his physical needs. It’s now his turn to be horrified. The first night of the marriage is also its last. The union is annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. Decades later, Edward reflects ruefully on his failure to call Florence back as she walked away from him along the beach. He now believes they could have reconciled and had a happy, satisfying life together.
John Crace, parliamentary sketch writer for the Guardian, is also the author of its regular ‘Digested Read’ pastiche feature. His summary of On Chesil Beach on its publication in 2007 made a pleasant change from the reverently admiring reviews of the book. Crace translates the finale of the conversation between Florence and Edward on the shingle as follows:
“Don’t you think we’re being rather melodramatic and that even in 1962 a couple might get over a crap shag on their wedding night?” she cried.
“Of course, but if we don’t split up, the whole book’s pointless.”
Ten years on, the story has lost none of its power to enrage. It’s fortunate that, once again, there’s light relief at the end of the tunnel – this time supplied by McEwan himself, in a two-stage coda to the main plot. This invention for Dominic Cooke’s film is inadvertently very funny, in spite of its also reinforcing one of the novella’s objectionable aspects: the author’s almost vindictive demonstration of what a costly error Edward made in his lack of response to Florence’s desperate words.
In a lighter-hearted, pre-coital conversation on Chesil Beach, Florence (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward (Billy Howle) discuss blues music. He’s a fan; she’s ignorant of anything non-classical but finds Chuck Berry ‘bouncy and merry’. Thirteen years after their break-up, Edward is running a record shop. A young schoolgirl brings a Chuck Berry album to the counter, explaining that it’s a birthday present for her mother, who’s interested only in classical music, except that she thinks Chuck Berry is bouncy and merry. The girl is called Chloe, the name Florence told Edward during their courtship that she would give a daughter. He realises who he’s talking to and lets Chloe (Bronte Carmichael) have the record for nothing. In the next scene, he’s with a group of friends, relaxing after a few drinks and maybe drugs too – after all, this is the liberated 1970s. To underline the point, Edward is on the sofa with a black chick on one arm and a white chick on the other. His mood turning from mellow to melancholy, he tells the story of a man who parted irrevocably from a woman that he loved and who loved him. His companions are puzzled and hushed – Edward might almost be talking about himself …
Cut to 2007. Sixty-something Edward is at the crease in a village cricket match. It’s typical of the serves-him-right description of his afterlife that, as far as the cinema audience is concerned, he’s out first ball. The lonely old codger then returns home (apparently the same home in which several earlier scenes, illustrating the young Edward’s family life, took place). He puts his one-person meal into the microwave. On the radio, he hears the voice of Florence, introduced by her interviewer (Mark Lawson) as a mother of three and a grandmother. The Ennismore Quartet, which she and fellow students set up forty-five years ago and in which Florence plays violin, is shortly to give its farewell performance in London. Florence and her husband Charles Morrell (Mark Donald), the Ennismore’s sour-faced cellist whom she seemed to despise back in 1962, arrive at the artists’ entrance of the Wigmore Hall, where a middle-aged Chloe (Nadia Townsend) wishes them well. They and the other musicians take the stage. During the performance, Florence catches sight of Edward in the audience. Their eyes – the only part of Saoirse Ronan’s and Billy Howle’s faces not encased in thickly applied ageing make-up – fill with tears.
Until this laughably clumsy finale, the film’s narrative has, like the book’s, moved between the wedding night and descriptions of Florence’s and Edward’s developing relationship, and their family relationships. Geoffrey Ponting (Samuel West) is brusquely businesslike at mealtimes with his wife and two daughters. When it comes to a tennis match with his prospective son-in-law, he’s not only viciously competitive but cheats. Edward’s mild-mannered father Lionel (Adrian Scarborough) is the head of a rural primary school – one reason why Florence’s mother Violet (Emily Watson), a social and an intellectual snob, is unimpressed by her elder daughter’s ‘country bumpkin’ choice of husband-to-be. Edward’s contrasting bohemian-artist mother Marjorie (Anne-Marie Duff) has never been right in the head since the brain injury she sustained in a freak accident. The picturesque effects of the injury include stripping off in public, forgetting who people are and retaining an encyclopaedic knowledge of art history. The film is also faithful to the original in playing fast and loose with what many people seem to accept as a central theme of the novella: that Edward and Florence are victims of a sexual and moral culture that’s on its last legs – a bit further into the decade, all might have been well.
On Chesil Beach keeps changing its mind as to whether or not the protagonists – she especially – are typical of their time and place. The film includes a sequence in which Florence and Edward, in a cinema watching A Taste of Honey, are the only people whose attention is on the screen: the young couples around them are deep in snogging. Florence’s younger sister Ruth (Bebe Cave) appears to find the subject of sex rather exciting. McEwan makes selective use of his premise that hidebound, put-up-or-shut-up conventions governed English life in 1962: there’s no evidence, for example, that either Florence’s parents or Edward’s father protest that annulment of the marriage would be premature or socially embarrassing. The emphasis on Edward’s regret for his unkind behaviour in the shingle showdown obscures the shockingness of Florence’s advice to her husband of a few hours that he look elsewhere for intercourse: plenty of newly married but sexually still fairly inexperienced men of later generations might have been appalled by such advice too. Most important, the implication that Florence’s terror of sex may be the result of childhood abuse by her father is expressed more pointedly and crudely in the film than in the book and thus more decisively drives a coach and horses through the story as a contemporary morality tale. If Florence was traumatised by her father’s carnal attentions, how would the sexual revolution of the 1960s have got that out of her system?
A much-honoured theatre director, Dominic Cooke also directed the second series of The Hollow Crown on television but On Chesil Beach is his first cinema feature. A combination of inhibiting respect for McEwan and inexperience in the medium may explain why it’s not an auspicious debut. There’s the occasional good sequence: as in the book, the railway accident makes you gasp. Marjorie Mayhew, standing too near the platform edge, is knocked unconscious by the impact of a door that suddenly opens in the train preparing to stop at the station. The moment is further enhanced by the puzzled, helpless expression that Adrian Scarborough gives Lionel Mayhew as he contemplates his stricken wife. Since flashbacks set in during the melon-and-Parma-ham starter of the wedding night dinner in the bridal suite, the bedroom action is repeatedly postponed to a nearly comical degree (as in a Doris Day-Rock Hudson vehicle circa 1962). But, when Edward finally gets on top of Florence, Cooke and his high-class cinematographer Sean Bobbitt bring out very well the textural and tonal contrasts in the faces of Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle. (Ronan’s Marian blue dress makes the point of Florence’s virginity too obviously but, with her pale skin, beautifully highlights her blue eyes.) On the beach, though, the principals’ positioning sometimes looks artificial – especially in the crucial shot of Edward’s frozen inaction. Billy Howle looks to be holding a pose – and holding on to it for dear life – until he hears Cooke shout ‘Cut!’
The hotel staff who dish up the ‘silver service’ dinner (Andy Burse and Rasmus Hardiker) snigger loudly outside the couple’s room once their job is done but their amusement is less offensive than Cooke’s (and McEwan’s) smirking contempt for the ghastly waiters and the too-too-awful food and wine. A maraschino cherry sits winkingly atop each melon semi-circle. A scene between Florence and a clergyman relative (Anton Lesser), who senses what’s worrying her and tries to get her to talk about it, is compelling until its obvious conclusion, when the flustered Florence drops a cup of tea and goes into paroxysms of apology. A few details of Cooke’s direction are baffling: when Edward excitedly tells his mother he’s got a first in his history degree and she responds nonsensically, why does he look more surprised than disappointed?
If you’d never seen Saoirse Ronan before this film, you’d likely be impressed by a distinctive new actress. If you’ve seen Brooklyn and Lady Bird or even the screen version of McEwan’s Atonement (2007), you’ll be less impressed – perhaps a bit disappointed that even Ronan, thoroughly accomplished as she is, can’t elevate On Chesil Beach. In the recent screen version of another overrated short novel, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, Billy Howle wasn’t overawed by the cachet of the source material. He is here: he speaks mostly slowly and carefully, as if nervous of damaging the priceless dialogue he’s been entrusted with. His facial reactions too seem over-prepared and undermine the idea of Edward as a naturally impulsive personality – a lad who, until very recently, tended to get into fights. Still, Howle isn’t physically miscast as a husky country boy to the extent that James McAvoy was in Atonement.
An exchange in which Violet asks what college Edward was at, Florence replies ‘UCL’ and her mother says, almost with horror, ‘but that’s London’ rings false both immediately (in the early 1960s, UCL wouldn’t commonly have been referred to by its initials) and retrospectively (Florence turns out to have been studying at the Royal College of Music). Emily Watson is undeniably witty as Violet, though. The one time I laughed when I think I was meant to was during a Ponting family lunch, when Geoffrey refers to ‘those green things’ and his wife replies ‘mangetout’. How much scorn Watson gets into those two syllables is a marvel. I was keen for more of her but she barely reappears – exasperating when there’s too much of Samuel West who, even allowing for the one-dimensional writing of his role, overdoes Florence’s father’s villainy. Bebe Cave (who also impressed in Tale of Tales) gives Ruth Ponting a fine blend of uncertainty and avidity. The film’s predictable score is by Dan Jones but there’s also plenty of classical music to assure the audience of On Chesil Beach they’re partaking of a work of art.
22 May 2018