French cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine brings a richness to the foggy shoreline and the tired town, but it’s a forbidding richness, and the vast majority of the film passes without a trace of music on the soundtrack.īecause of that, the silence that envelops “Ammonite” develops an almost physical presence. We wait for something to happen, but the movie is as quiet and restrained as the characters. “I always look tired,” Mary says, accurately.Īlso Read: Telluride Lineup Includes 'Ammonite,' 'The Duke,' 'Nomadland' for Canceled Festival “You look tired,” Charlotte tells her early in her convalescence. Mary’s misery seems to have been slowly settling inside her for decades Charlotte’s is more recent, and of unknown but likely traumatic origin.īut when Charlotte collapses at the door to the shop where Mary works and lives with her mother, the doctor insists that Mary become a nursemaid of sorts as well, turning her bed over to Charlotte and tending to her needs. Mary is brusque and forceful, Charlotte quiet and timid at first, they seem bonded only in a general moroseness, neither woman showing the inclination or perhaps the energy to smile. He pays Anning to watch over her, an arrangement that doesn’t please the older woman - but then, what does? Roderick, who is anxious to get on with his planned fossil-hunting trip across Europe, decides Charlotte should recover from that melancholia in Lyme Regis, as if a cold and dreary seaside town in which she knows nobody is the ideal place to cheer up. There’s a hint that perhaps they’re recovering from the death of a child, but nothing is spelled out, except that Charlotte is suffering from what Roderick patronizingly calls “a mild melancholia.” He offers to pay Anning if she’ll allow him to tag along for a day of fossil-hunting - and while Anning is a severe, matter-of-fact woman who will not allow herself to be the least bit friendly or accommodating, she accepts the offer.Īlso Read: Kate Winslet Now Regrets Working With Woody Allen and Roman Polanski: 'What the F- Was I Doing?'įor her part, Charlotte is meek and quiet she briefly perks up when a maître d’ attempts to seat her and her husband in a crowded dining room, but he prefers a quieter room and she remains subservient. Saoirse Ronan plays Murchison, who is pulled into Anning’s desultory shop by her husband, Roderick Murchison (James McArdle), a would-be scientist who is much impressed by the fact that a celebrated (if underpaid) paleontologist is holed up in Lyme Regis. But the film is also a fictionalized version of a moment in Anning’s life, with Winslet breathing sad, vibrant life into a scientist who may or may not have had a same-sex relationship with Charlotte Murchison. “Ammonite” is similarly rural in setting, taking place in the small seaside town of Lyme Regis in southern England - but it takes place in the 1840s, when paleontologist Mary Anning would walk the rocky shoreline searching for fossils and gathering specimens to sell to tourists.Īnning was a real paleontologist who lived in Lyme Regis and made some extraordinary finds but wasn’t afforded the respect she deserved because she was a woman, and the rough details of her life in “Ammonite” are accurate. Lee’s last film, his feature debut, was 2017’s “God’s Own Country,” the Sundance- and British Independent Film Award-winning drama about a romance between two men on a Yorkshire farm. Its pleasures are subtle, but they linger.Īlso Read: 'Ammonite' Trailer: Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan Ignite Slow-Burning Passion in First Look (Video) The film comes a year after Celine Sciamma’s gorgeous “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” another period drama that focused on the romantic and sexual relationship between two women - but where “Portrait” was lush and extravagant, “Ammonite” is spare and hushed. But it’s so quiet that it makes you lean into the narrative and strain for the details that come out slowly - and even its most charged love scene grounds sexual pleasure deeply in pain, longing and separation. The upcoming Neon release is also a beautiful, deeply-felt character study of the women marvelously played by Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan. The story of a passionate, almost desperate romance between two women in 19th century Britain, it sets that passion in an austere, minimalist frame it’s either the most reserved passionate movie you’ll ever see, or the most passionate reserved one. Francis Lee’s “Ammonite” might be the biggest study in contrasts that you’ll find at the Toronto International Film Festival this year.
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