Ammonite was a very highly anticipated movie over here in the 2girls1blog camp. Queer WLW movies are far and few between and to have two well known and established actresses in Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan involved was a bonus. One thing I am also grateful is that we were able to see this on the big screen in the cinema as part of the BFI film festival, this was the closing film of the festival.
Set in 1840s Lyme Regis, Mary Anning (Winslet) was an acclaimed palaeontologist, selling fossils in her shop to provide for her elderly mother. A tourist, visits the shop and makes arrangements with Mary for his wife Charlotte (Ronan) to spend no more than six weeks in Lyme with Mary to somehow cure her melancholy. Charlotte was pale and thin, she was like a ghost in her appearance - she barely spoke or ate. She had been suggested to bathe in the sea as a way to make her feel better, however a dip in the English Channel in the winter isn't for the faint hearted and it proved too much for frail Charlotte. It was then up to Mary to look after her while she recovered from pneumonia. Before this point, Mary was a harsh character, she spent her days up and down the coast line looking for fossils and rocks. Her work was hard and not always rewarding. At first she wasn't too happy to having to be looking after Charlotte but after a while you could tell that Mary was delicate and attentive in healing Charlotte back to full health. This was a turning point in their relationship. As the movie went on, their relationship bloomed and they formed a close connection.
The performances from the two lead actresses were breath-taking. The flow of the film really was dictated by their timing and delivery of their dialogue and physical movement. There were a lot of natural scenes, raw and environmental. It made the audience really focus into the two characters and you could follow along with the development of their emotions and feeling towards each other. I was really intrigued by the character of Mary Anning. I felt that Kate Winslet played her so beautifully, in a way which you could understand her on a deeper level. She works alone, and her work is her life, and when there's a big discovery, she can't even get the credit as how could a woman be responsible for such cutting edge scientific work. To welcome someone in like Charlotte would be difficult as it messes with her routine. But then there are little glimpses of moments where you see Mary shift, you see her letting her guard down little by little. You also get to see why maybe her barriers were so high in the first place as a hint of a previous relationship with fellow palaeontologist Elizabeth Philpot played by Fiona Shaw.
It could be criticised for being a little slow, but for me it just added to the tension. At some parts the sexual tension was honestly off the scale. I also read that it is loosely based on their lives, but we cannot be sure that Mary and Charlotte had a relationship that was more than a friendship.... haha. Anyway, I did really enjoy Ammonite, it reminded me a lot of 'A Portrait of a Lady on Fire' which I would recommend also. I am just appreciative of any queer love story to get exposure, and to have something as beautiful as Ammonite, I cannot complain.
Rating: 7.5/10
By Leanne
I have such mixed feelings about this film. There are lots of great things to love about it but I just don't know that I fully enjoyed watching it. Being a film that features two women who are canonically 'together', I was quite excited because representation is far and few between. Being set less than 100 years prior to, this year's earlier release, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and being shot a fair bit on the beach, it's an easy comparison to make. I'm not convinced that I enjoyed Ammonite as much as I enjoyed Portrait.
Ammonite is Francis Lee's second queer film, following his first, full-length, directorial debut God's Own Country. It's an interesting film because Lee used the real life figure Mary Anning and applied his story, there is no evidence to suggest that Anning was not heterosexual. I like that he choose to use Anning as, although we know her name know as a leading paleontologist, at the time she would have been unrecognised as she was a working class woman. Lee used this film as a way to explore Anning's position both in her local society and the paleontological society as well as creating the relationship between her and Charlotte.
The casting for this film is great. When casting, it was important for Lee that the leading lady be British and Kate Winslet is an excellent choice. She was so committed to the role, she even went fossil hunting with a local expert before filming! Winslet plays brooding Anning very well, with her character slowly warming to Charlotte as their relationship develops. Saoirse Ronan is a great on-screen partner playing love interest and friend Charlotte. Her character also develops throughout the film becoming much brighter and happier as time passes. She is hilarious at the end, when asking Anning to move in with her after a short time together, proving that the lesbian u-hauling stereotype transcends time😂(even if this didn't really happen!) I also loved the appearance of LGBT actress Fiona Shaw playing Anning's ex and fellow paleontologist Elizabeth Philpot.
The reason I have such mixed feelings about this film is the lack of actual events that happen in the film. Don't get me wrong, most WLW films are all about the yearning and sexual tension building up, (seen in most WLW pairings) but really Ammonite had very little else going on and I did just find my mind occasionally wandering. I wonder too, if this has anything to do with the colour palette of the film. It was a very grey and bleak colour palette entirely, that didn't really pick up or change, even as the film progressed.
One final thing I would love to shout out is the representation of body hair! This sounds ridiculous but it's so nice that not all directors are not feeding into the perfect woman's body trope - especially with a film set in a time when women probably wouldn't have cared, been expected to or have the facilities to shave all the time!
I still overall enjoyed this film and am always appreciative of all and any LGBT representation in films, especially when one of the pair doesn't die, but I can't help but feel this film was a tad tedious. I still believe it will have a major impact on queer cinema and the way that actors/directors approach presenting queer relationships and would still recommend this as an essential watch for any good queer cinema list.
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