Quendrith Johnson

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

With Céline Sciamma’s French movie PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE in 2019, some felt the stark same-sex love story, a period piece, was too ‘powerful’ for mainstream audiences. Thus, the film was passed over for worldwide competition even by home country France. Now there is another costume drama with Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan on offer that eerily parallels the love among outlier women.

Director Francis Lee’s take on 'down-low' love in AMMONITE, from NEON to be released on Nov. 13 in theaters, is more culturally specific to anglophone audiences.

Here it is 1840s England, where “acclaimed but overlooked fossil hunter Mary Anning,” the press notes explain, “and a young woman sent to convalesce by the sea” - by her unwitting husband no less - “develop an intense relationship, altering both of their lives forever.”

Unlike Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel from Sciamma’s film, who play equals in age at least, Winslet is cast as the older paleontologist to Ronan’s disaffected young wife protege.

These are two very different films, that handle the woman-seeking-woman forbidden period-piece theme with divergent outcomes; although the violin scores and sea-scenes bear a more than striking resemblance to PORTRAIT.

However, Mary Anning is an actual historic character who lived in Dorset, hunted fossils from the Jurassic Period, and did find a marine sea creature circa when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Anning lived from 1799 to 1847, which puts her in the era of Charles Dickens, now considered a Dickensian period for the social commentary and reforms suggested by the writer of masterworks such as “A Tales of Two Cities.”

Whether Mary Anning would have been able to cross into the then-taboo realms of a same-sex affair during the period seems probable, although stocks were used for punishment in the UK up until 1872, and various other inhumane forms of punishment were very much a real cost of such liaisons. Truth be told, there is now a small but growing independent body of work for women’s love stories like this one. BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR leads the pack of films as disparate as BOYS DON’T CRY to CAROL. 

But the energy of these taut feminine unraveling emotional psycho-sexual yarns can best be traced back to Jane Campion’s THE PIANO, where Holly Hunter nailed this female angst to the wall in a performance this still resonates. She was the ultimate ammonite, or ancient snail, to come out of her shell, as is the symbolic title in this film. 

An ammonite is a long-gone relative of the chambered nautilus, of Golden Mean proportions, that lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, roughly 140 million years ago. Women’s’ sexuality has not been similarly crystallized, or mineralized over the years, but takes life in different forms in movies like these, which, by exploring the ‘forbidden’ allow audiences to play out their own conclusions on what it is to be female in the waking world, then and now.

Here are fossil-crossed lovers, Winslet & Ronan in AMMONITE

[All images courtesy of NEON.]

Stars: Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan with Gemma Jones, James McArdle, Alec Secareanu and Fiona Shaw*

Produced by: Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly

So this is a teaser trailer of the film to come, and, happily, at least the title isn’t urchin or something less poetic, as AMMONITE certainly strikes a lone slow snail-like note.

*As a bonus, you will note the outstanding English actor Fiona Shaw (BLACK DAHLIA) is in this film. Shaw is the gold-leaf to any narrative frame on screen, she's that good. Even Gore Vidal loved her work.

Coming Nov. 13, to a (cross fingers) theater near you.

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