He asks if, in return for a substantial cash payment, he might leave his wife behind to lodge with Anning for a while, so that the sea air and healthy scientific thoughts will cure her “melancholia”. This is Roderick Murchison (James McArdle) who has in tow his catatonically depressed wife Charlotte (Ronan). Mary lives with her placid mother: a ripe performance from Gemma Jones.Ī smoothly condescending London scientist swans in, professing to admire Anning’s work. This subsidises her serious scientific work, scouring the shore for fossils, a beachcomber for ancient evolutionary secrets. She is a scientist forced to be a shopkeeper, running a tourist trap in Lyme Regis (“Anning’s Fossils & Curios”), selling seashell-encrusted hand mirrors and the like. Winslet gives her a look of perpetual wary resentment but fierce intellectual assertion. Winslet plays Anning as a tough, capable but careworn woman, one grown accustomed to not declaring her feelings. But I have to say that – paradoxically – the figures of this bodiced and bonneted movie, despite being based on real life, seemed a tiny bit less real than the fictional figures of his previous film, God’s Own Country. It is a film about a real-life relationship speculatively reimagined with some artistic licence. Combining these alpha players doubles or actually quadruples the screen voltage, and their passion co-exists with the cool, calm subtlety with which Lee inspects the domestic circumstances in which their paths crossed. Actually, the film that swam into my head afterwards was Jane Campion’s The Piano.Īmmonite is an absorbing drama that sensationally brings together two superlative performers: Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet. The complicated power balance between the principals makes the comparison incorrect. But it isn’t exactly a tale of two French Lieutenant’s Women, despite the inevitably tense walk up the fabled Cobb, filmed in thoughtful longshot. T he open secret of Victorian sexuality is rediscovered by film-maker Francis Lee in this fine, intimate, intelligently acted movie about forbidden love in 1840s Lyme Regis.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |