![]() Your review suggests to me that the film here was intentionally made for the nude bits and I imagine it paid off at the box office. In contrast, Lady Chatterley’s Lover seems to have had a more acceptable theme and, whilst banned here and there for a while, it was all the (shock, horror) fleshy bits that readers and viewers wanted to read about and see, and (hmm) condemn. But a rumour starts to undermine the school as parents begin to remove their children and to ostracise the two teachers. There is no certainty that they are lesbian and there are no explicit titillating scenes, of course, which adds to the drama and never let’s on. Like the later play, The Boys in the Band, it moved along the LGBT debate….It is a tale about two women who run a girl’s boarding school. ![]() Mari and I eventually saw it performed at The Independent Theatre. The first and most risqué that I remember is The Children’s Hour, a play by Lillian Hellman, back in the 1930’s which caused an uproar on Broadway and was banned here from performance until after a film was made of it starring Shirly MacLaine. There seems to be a heap of stories/films based on this theme. I would not have been likely to want to see the movie but now I’m sure. The story had much potential with many quality ingredients that simply have not gelled and a climax that lies somewhere between opaque and meaningless. Neither a biopic nor truthful history, Ammonite is still pretty to watch in parts. ![]() A prolonged naked love-making scene with one straddling the face of the other is therefore little more than gratuitous titillation. However, the narrative theme of lesbian love in Ammonite is a creative invention as there is no historical evidence of a romance between the real Mary and Charlotte. Perhaps the intent of the film is to portray Anning as a feminist or a victim of sexually repressed Victorian England. It presents Anning as a cranky poor shop-lady who pokes around beach rocks to sell tourist trinkets. One might expect such a film to celebrate Anning’s place in history, but Ammonite is not even a half-hearted tribute to her achievements. Other than that, much of what can be gleaned from the film must be inferred, as the spartan dialogue is silent on what either woman thinks or feels. An unlikely pairing, their bonding is nurtured in the beauty of the coastal village: pebble-strewn beachscapes, lapping waves and the sound of water rushing across stones. Mary is a surly recluse who never smiles, while Charlotte is an animated and curious young woman. The film’s centre of gravity is firmly anchored on Mary and Charlotte’s love story, which progresses from tantalisingly tentative touches and glances to passionate love-making. As Charlotte is nursed through her depressive ailments, the women grow close and eventually become lovers. ![]() Mary teaches him some paleontology basics before he departs on a tour, leaving his wife in Mary’s paid care and for the health benefits of ocean air. One day a well-to-do London couple arrive in her modest shop: amateur rock collector Roderick (James McArdle) and his ‘sickly’ wife Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan). Set in beautiful coastal England, the story shows Mary excavating beached fossils which were sold to tourists. Raised poor and self-educated, she achieved global fame at a time when only men could work in her field. The story is ‘inspired’ by the real Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) who was a significant pioneer in paleontology during the early 1800s. Its disappointment lies in the way the film’s central figure is diminished with an historically false narrative created as a pretext for yet another tortured lesbian love tale. Despite having top-shelf talent, superb cinematography, and sumptuous settings, the queer period melodrama Ammonite (2020) promises much but delivers little.
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