VOD Review - Ammonite

Even though it might not seem like it, this film is a bit of a biopic. It incorporates real-life people into its fictional narrative. Writer-director Francis Lee is taking a lot of dramatic license and telling a story that has a lot of truth in it but is fictionalized to some degree. The film tells the story of the personal and private life of a real-life woman but not a lot of information is known about her personal and private life. She was not known to have any heterosexual relationships, so Lee's interpretation is that she was a queer person. Lee in fact depicts her as a lesbian. This might not be true, but Lee's interpretation for his film can't be disproved. Therefore, his interpretation is perfectly fine, but what he decides to do with that interpretation might not be perfectly fine.

This is not the first time Lee has done a same-sex romance drama. His previous film was God's Own Country (2017), which was about a same-sex romance between two young men in England. It was ostensibly about homophobia in a rural area or a more isolated region. Yet, it ends with a triumph of love and the same-sex couple ending on a happier note. This film doesn't have that triumph. The same-sex couple ends on a less happy note, if not a bitter note or a sad one. One could argue that his 2017 film was set in the present-day of the 21st century, whereas this one is set in the mid 19th century. Yes, the homophobia in the past made it difficult for LGBTQ people to have happy endings. There is evidence that LGBTQ people from 200 years ago, people like Leonardo da Vinci, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, had happy same-sex romances. Therefore, it's not clear why Lee's couple here couldn't have had a happy same-sex romance too.

Kate Winslet (Little Children and Titantic) stars as Mary Anning, a real-life paleontologist who lived in Lyme Regis, England, until she died in 1847 at the age of 47. She became world famous, specifically in the scientific community. She was a fossil collector and she found dinosaur bones from the Jurassic period that changed thinking about prehistoric life. We get a sense of how important she is, but, she's depicted as a very quiet, unassuming, stoic and arguably humble person. She collects rocks along the shore and beach in Lyme. She brings them back to her shop where she also lives. She cleans them and exposes the fossils. She then sells them out of the shop with the help of her mother.

She doesn't seem to socialize much. She actually seems rather anti-social, which may also not be accurate to who the real Mary Anning was. She mainly is on the rocks or in her shop doing her work. She doesn't seem interested in anything else, even though there are occasionally people who are interested in her. There are even people who invite her to do things with them, but she either declines or disengages from those people. This changes when another scientist asks to learn from her and how she does her work. He's not asking to be an apprentice, but he does want to shadow her. She allows it because he's offering a handsome sum of money, which she and her mother could certainly use.

Saoirse Ronan (Little Women and Lady Bird) co-stars as Charlotte Murchison, the wife to the scientist who wants to learn from Mary. Charlotte seems like she's also a bit anti-social. The reason though seems to be due to a mental illness. Her husband claims she's been diagnosed with melancholia, what might be called depression today. It's not clear what could have caused the depression, but, like many women, she's stifled and oppressed at times by the patriarchal nature of her marriage where her husband dictates everything and she virtually has no voice or control over her life.

When her husband abandons her in Lyme to go off to some unknown trip, her depression seems exacerbated. However, Mary reluctantly takes care of her. At first, she does so in a motherly way. Eventually, it's revealed that there is an attraction between the two. Spending so much time together with Mary nurturing Charlotte, a romance develops, one that becomes very sexual, as the two are seemingly repressed lesbians. When this film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, it was only a few months after the French film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2020) was released in the United States. People were comparing the two because that French film was also about two women also living in the 1800's who develop a romance, while the two are waiting at a seaside home.

This film could be seen as an English-language version of Céline Sciamma's critically acclaimed film. Many though saw this film as a lesser version. I would tend to agree. Comparing the two, it's clear that Lee doesn't employ the kind of visual flourishes that Sciamma does to make her film feel cinematic or bolder. The first distinction is in the colors. Sciamma's film felt alive with color. This film feels dull and drab, which is akin to his previous film, but Sciamma's film had sequences that were somewhat inventive and eye-popping. This one isn't eye-popping, as it's shot rather straightforward. The focus for the most part seems to be on the actresses who do a fantastic job here at expressing either the depression or repressed homosexuality, but I don't think there's anything here that is so outstanding or beyond what either actress has done before with the exception of Ronan who is thrown into a very intense sex scene, which I don't think I've seen her do before.

However, seeing the sex scenes, it could be shown how this film was directed by a man compared to how a woman directed similar material. Lee's sex scenes are very intense and there's a lot of graphic nudity. Lee even takes a moment to depict a man fully nude for no real reason. This is somewhat different from how Sciamma depicted her sex scenes and how she treated the nudity in her film. It wasn't as graphic. It was arguably more tasteful and artistic. Lee is simply in one's face with it, which some in the LGBTQ community would certainly appreciate.

Yet, I'm not sure how much credit I would give Lee overall. This film could be seen as lazy or derivative. If you compare this film to Lee's previous film, there are many times where certain scenes or shots seemed like exact repeats of scenes or shots that Lee did in God's Own Country. First of all, two actors from his 2017 film appear here. Gemma Jones who plays Mary's mother and Alec Secareanu who plays Mary's doctor both were in God's Own Country. Jones was practically in the same role in that 2017 film as this one. She basically plays the protagonist's mother in both films. There is even a scene in this film that felt like a direct rip where she enters into the dining room to find the same-sex couple eating together and is suspicious of it. It's the same here as in that 2017 film.

Another scene lifted from God's Own Country involves Mary and Charlotte lying together in bed. Mary is lying completely nude on the right-side of the frame and Charlotte is wearing nothing but a sweater on the left-side of the frame. It is exactly as a scene in his 2017 film where the two guys are nude and dressed in exactly the same way. The person whose house they're living is the one that's nude. The person who is the visitor is the one who's in the sweater. It's the exact same dynamic. There's a scene in Portrait of a Lady on Fire where the same-sex couple are lying in bed in various states of dress, so it's not as much a rip-off in the sense that it's an expected scene but the way Lee frames the characters, positions and dresses them is the rip-off.

If he was going to rip-off his own work, it's a wonder why he wouldn't go all the way and also give his characters here a happy ending or at least a less ambiguous one. At least, he would've left viewers with a sweet taste in the end instead of a sour one, even though the penultimate scene is probably one of the best acted scenes involving something sour happening that I've seen in a while.

Rated R for full-frontal nudity, graphic sexuality and brief language.

Running Time: 1 hr. and 57 mins.

Available on Hulu.