About half way into “Ammonite”, the second film of British filmmaker Francis Lee, there is a scene that lays the groundwork for the shift that will come in its second half. Mary Anning (Kate Winslet, a self-taught palaeontologist, has been tending to Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan), the ailing wife of a rich fossil-hunter off on a European tour. She needs the money the care-work brings. After a tentative start, their friendship comes to deepen and the two attend a music recital together at the behest of the local doctor, whose advances Mary is either ignorant of or disinterested in.
Charlotte, a woman of society, is at home in the cultured environment but Mary fades into the background and watches as Charlotte seems to drift further from her. It’s the beginning of Mary’s admittance of her feelings, but there are no words for Winslet to speak. Instead, the noise of the party – chatter, music, tinkering – overpowers the scene as the camera follows her eyes. Watching, yearning, pondering. Physically, she is doing little. She has no lines. Mary is removed from anyone, an entity on to herself. But the moment is so specific and so instructive to the ways Winslet is matching performance to theme in “Ammonite”. With the rise and fall of her chest, heaving in distress. With the darting eyes piercing into the backs of strangers. And with the way that she holds her entire body, as if wound up like something wrapped too tightly, Winslet invites us immediately into understanding who this woman is.
There are a number of moments like this in “Ammonite”. They are mostly wordless. And mostly observational with little explicated directly. Instead, we are left to find meanings in movements in silence – a recurring task and demand for audiences watching “Ammonite” that come to mark the way the film interrogates us, and then asks us to interrogate it. And it is a demand that feels challenging.
Although calling Lee’s film ‘challenging’ might feel like coded criticism, it is instead a declaration of truth. By design, Lee is challenging us to reconsider intricacies of expression and relationships within the context of the film. The presentation of Lyme Regis along the Southern English coastline in the 1840s is vivid and a reminder of Lee’s interest in setting and atmosphere. Between “God’s Own Country”, his previous film, and “Ammonite,” Lee reveals an incredibly precise interest in the idea of terrain and setting as a pathetic fallacy emphasising mood. It’s the lone aspect of his films that interrupt the realism that sustains them, and the rustic realism in “Ammonite” is almost jarring for the ways it challenges our notions of a period romance.
Before the romance is foregrounded, “Ammonite” is a character-study of Mary, whose taciturn reticence defines the film and feels metaphorically represented in the film’s own moody jaggedness. As Mary, Winslet paces through the film, often silent. She seems to carry the weight of disappointment and pain on her shoulders, living alongside her mother in the shop they run. For much of the first act, the film only alludes to important events, leaving us to discern who this woman is. By the time Charlotte arrives, we come to understand the gaps and ellipsis in information as critical. Mary spends her days walking the beach, exploring and searching for rocks. Lee makes the audience complicit in the act of searching and finding. We begin to look for meaning in the images, reaching for something to discern in the silences and gaps. As we become co-explorers, the film becomes richer.
And there is no richer find in “Ammonite” than Winslet’s performance. “Ammonite” offers an incisive perspective into her use of her talents over the last decade, where she has played leading roles that subvert and inform notions of herself as a star. There’s a direct link from the erotic romance of “Labor Day” to absurdist sartorial masquerade of “The Dressmaker” to the histrionic melodrama of “Wonder Wheel” (one of the best performances of the last decade). Her work in “Ammonite” joins this list of hard to love women, who refuse to compromise. Even in films that do not always work, Winslet has been challenging her own competencies as an actor gravitating to stories of women trapped by societies that cannot understand them.
She bends “Ammonite” to her will. Her performance feels as much a defining authorial act as Lee’s direction. He gives her room to define the ways that scenes develop so that even in her silence – and she rarely speaks – she is shaping the way that we see and understand the people around her.
Lee’s specific focus on Mary could threaten the transference of the romance, but Ronan meets Winslet at every turn. Her role is the secondary one, but it’s a turn that invites her to use up different sensibilities and it’s one that she relishes. For Ronan, Charlotte is a kind of ambivalent society girl – at once foolishly ignorant of the world around her, but with bursts of incisive perception that complicate the ways people see her, especially Mary. The film only hints at her trauma, but it speaks to Ronan’s ability to fill in gaps that Charlotte feels fully realised early on. The first moment of physical contact between the two – innocuous but not careless – is a marvel of performance as Winslet’s body seems to contract, as if protecting herself from any outside force. It is also a defining moment for Ronan, who manages to make a deliberate act come across as careless. The binary of open/close is the defining one. Ronan’s open face looking up at Winslet’s guarded countenance is central to the dynamic.
It’s slow cinema but its pace is not purposeless. The plot becomes secondary for the ways “Ammonite” asks us to consider the potential of value of a lesbian relationship in this constricting environment. And part of Lee’s interest is in refusing any hint of palatability. Like Mary, the film asks us to meet it on its own terms – all the way to the end. Lee leaves us with a moment between the two women, a wordless encounter, that raises more questions than anything else. But it’s a surety of our intelligence, and a keen understanding of who these women are, that makes the moment feel impactful and thoughtful rather than unfinished. It’s part of the larger dynamic of the film that recognises an intelligent capacity for depth without explication and merely by suggestion. There’s a richness of context here, where even the secondary characters (Fiona Shaw, Gemma Jones, Alec Secăreanu, James McArdle all craft sharp characters in brief roles) have shades of great depth. “Ammonite” is not typical, nor is it easy. But its roughness is a rewarding challenge.
Ammonite is available for streaming and purchase on PrimeVideo and other streaming services.
