![]() ![]() ![]() Nobody with even modestly open-minded sensibilities will walk away in a blind fury. #Ammonite sex professional#We are left with a perfectly respectable, eminently professional slice of prestige arthouse. They should, of course, be planned, but it would be better if they looked as if they weren’t. It may be unkind to constantly harp back to Lee’s previous film, but, though coyness is as absent as gratuitousness, we get little of the messy, squelchy chaos that made the al fresco coupling so convincing in God’s Own Country. Much attention has inevitably been focused on the explicit sex scenes between the two leads. There is no smidgeon of the complex dynamics that drove Céline Sciamma’s superior, structurally similar Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Her dialogue feels like initial sketches for a character rather than a completed draft. Ronan, as always, does the best she can, but this is a thinly written part that gives too few clues as to motivation. Her face scrubbed with the make-up that looks like no make-up, head powering forward, voice permanently clipped, she gives us a convincing take on a woman who has embraced voluntary tunnel vision – look left or right and she may be reminded of unfulfilled desires. ![]() Winslet fares better with meatier material. ![]() Fiona Shaw is here to offer stalwart support as an older mentor.īut whither the palaeontology? When it comes to what we learn about Anning and Murchison’s achievements, the film may as well be set among shelf-stackers in a suburban hardware giant.Īnyway, we still have a chance to watch two of the era’s greatest actors at work. Nobody could fault Winslet or Ronan for effort. Stéphane Fontaine's cinematography works hard at bleeding washed-out shades through a location where even the food – mushrooms, the most grey of all foods, for luncheon – tends towards pathetically fallacious monochrome. Lee has as sound a grasp of rain-blasted Lyme Regis as he did of mud-splattered Yorkshire in God's Own Country. Seeing the finished film, one finds oneself wondering if the modern-day Anning family members might have had a point, though there is plenty to savour. In real life, Murchison, played here by 26-year-old Saoirse Ronan, was a decade older than Anning, who is given grim presence by 45-year-old Kate Winslet, but it's not as if Cleopatra looked much like Elizabeth Taylor.Īnd yet. It is true that the film-makers in this instance have also reversed the age difference. Who really cares? Since the time of Sir Walter Scott – and long before that – creators of historical entertainments have been tweaking and poking what we naively call "the facts". There is no evidence whatsoever that the two were romantically entangled. A year or so ago, when Francis Lee, director of the excellent God's Own Country (in which a new arrival to a rainy part of England had a passionate same-sex relationship with Gemma Jones' grumpy offspring), announced that his next project (in which a new arrival to a rainy part of England has a passionate same-sex relationship with Gemma Jones' grumpy offspring) was to hang around Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison, two admired 19th-century fossil-hunters, at least one relative of the former raised polite objections. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |