After a rocky start, they each end up infatuated with the values that the other-grace, fortitude-respectively doesn’t have.Īmmonite is visceral. So he leaves Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan) in Mary’s care, much to her aggravation but with a salary that she cannot turn down. One of those is Roderick Murchison (James McArdle), who, while on a tour of the country, makes a point to stop in on Mary and inquire about her work.Īfter convincing her to give him a tour of her excavation route, he ventures that it might be good for his wife to stay in the town and become Mary’s apprentice.
Her independence is both admired and feared, and her work unknown except to the most interested of scientists. Mary lives in the Lyme Regis region of England, a remote and touristy coastal town where she digs up fossils and runs a gift shop with her mother. Why not?! Who’s to say that every person who contributed something to history was a boring straight? Here is the telling of a historic figure and instead of making her heterosexual by default, it explores the interplay between her gender, profession, and time of existence through the lens of a same-sex romance. Knowing that, in some respects, is what makes Ammonite so interesting.
But this is, at its core, a film about a searing relationship between two women, though there is no historical basis for that romance, or even the insinuation that Mary was queer. The film’s celebration of her contributions gives credit to a female scientist whose time and circumstances dictated that she would not receive the recognition she deserved. How much you should think about Anning’s biography while watching is a prickly point. In Ammonite, Winslet plays Mary Anning, a pioneering British fossil excavator who lived in the first half of the 1800s. So it is with a curious-and, let’s face it, voyeuristic-eye that the attention is turned on Ammonite. I don’t think I’ve seen a movie that was better at portraying the confused, erotic complications of gay sex, again, in a forbidden place. God’s Own Country married sex with longing in the way that we all, because of how it’s talked about, think that Brokeback Mountain did. That’s the thing that still sticks with me today. It is probably not overstepping to say that, yes, the film is gorgeous, devastating, and heartbreaking… but also the fucking. It’s a movie that deserves thousands of words of praise for how expertly it captures the emotional volatility of sexual, passionate, imperfect, forbidden love-and is also iconic for its explicit and hot-as-hell gay sex scenes. The film is by writer-director Francis Lee, whose most significant previous work is 2017’s God’s Own Country. (She’s already done two major interviews in which she explains she’s not concerned about awards anymore, while dropping bombshell quote after endearing anecdote that seem acutely calibrated to kick off an award-season run.) It’s the movie you’ve already heard about, the one with the strange title in which Kate Winslet has a lesbian sex scene and is hanging her Oscar hopes on.
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