電影《默愛》影評：[Film Review] Ammonite (2020) 7.9/10

After setting the world on fire with his debut feature, the Yorkshire gay romance GOD’S OWN COUNTRY (2017), Francis Lee delineates another queer love story in his sophomore offering AMMONITE, but of the opposite sex, about the female paleontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847), played by Oscar winning Winslet, and her fictive, amorous fling with Charlotte Murchison (Ronan), a young wife from the upper crust.

Yes, the operative word is 「fling」, AMMONITE, at first glance, looks like an English counterpart to Céline Sciamma’s PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019), both with sapphic attraction in the dead center, and a coastal setting at the periphery, but tonally, they are poles apart. If Sciamma compassionately evokes an internal commotion of sexual awakening and once-in-a-lifetime passion, what Lee tries to hammer home is the rude facts that Mary and Charlotte are anything but cut from the same cloth, divided by their class, disposition, age and Weltanschauung, their passion act is the outgrowth of spending too much time together other than something more reverberating, and once their fling finishes, any attempt to rekindle their passion is more or less, a wishful thinking, as Charlotte’s naiveté corroborates, can a poor little rich girl entice a stalwart, working-class, woman of science into posh contentedness, nary a chance.

One of the chief sticking points from the negative feedback is leveled at the casting of two heterosexual name stars Winslet and Ronan and the lack of chemistry thereof, and indeed, the raw, libidinous impulse emanated from GOD’S OWN COUNTRY by two anonymous actors (Josh O’Connor and Alec Secareanu, the latter returns here as a courteous doctor with a dulcet foreign accent), is supplanted here by a more contained, stiff, distaff bond that takes more than an hour to build, since initially, Mary doesn’t see eye to eye with Charlotte, the hothouse flower ilk who has no clue of how to scrape a carrot.

Their love scenes are conducted in a proficient, if mechanical fashion that smacks of an 「I dare, you dare」 competition to go off the beaten path (though for Winslet, she is much experienced to perform in the raw than Ronan), and one cannot help get the impression that it is a 「job」 to be done for both actresses, as if it were their crowning glory had they been able to nail the audacious bravado professionally (and as a matter of fact, they do).

But, on second thoughts, this purely physical sexual statement might just be what Lee intends to exhibit, as the thematics here are not two souls who are meant to be together, but another type of love affair, the aleatory, ill-sorted one, Mary can never get out of her hardened, anti-social shells whereas Charlotte, more likely, will remain a helpless victim of her class and entitlement. That somehow desolate message can be accounted for the less enthusiastic reactions the film courts since its release, yet, on a technical level, AMMONITE is no less marvelous than its forgoing predecessors.

Shot in Lyme Regis, a coastal town in West Dorset where Mary spent most of her years, running a curios shop with her aging mother Molly (Jones, shamming death-dealing coughs with a dour irritation), AMMONITE venerates both its heroines and subjects, faithfully re-enacts the duo’s muddy efforts of locating and extracting salable fossils on the insalubrious, wuthering beach where affections germinate from working in tandem (and the film is teeming with gorgeous two-shots). And details are meticulously tended, for instance, Winslet’s hands and fingers are under sedulous reconstruction that simulates the effect of perennial toiling. Also the muted fabric of its Victorian era costumes and decors unostentatiously chimes in with the overall quietly smoldering vibes that are so rewardingly captivating to those who can be drawn to them gradually.

Winslet flexes her muscles doughtily and uncompromisingly in incarnating Mary’s ironclad resilience, her silent grievance (sexism in the academics is too commonplace to flag up, given only a toehold here, but Lee do know how and where to nail his colors to the mast), her sacrosanct dignity and the carapace that becomes her natural defense mechanism, in a word, she brilliantly ennobles and humanizes Mary (though we may need another biopic to honor her remarkable and under-presented academical achievements), not in a sloppy way, but keeping her integrity intact while laying bare the minuteness of her emotional states. Resultantly, less prominent is Ronan’s star turn, she cannot hold a candle to Winslet, not solely because her Charlotte is less interesting a character, but also one finds Charlotte’s womanly fragility and exquisiteness peculiarly regressive after her many a prior role stalwartly modernizing female representation.

As far as Your Truly is concerned, AMMONITE is a captivating addition to the expanding lesbian cinema, a different kettle of fish with its cracker-barrel matter-of-factness, and a stiff upper lip that intimates its provenance, nothing earth-shattering, yet, Lee obtains an imprimatur as a gay male who can conceive and construct a lesbian drama with a difference, no matter how unhoped-for it is.

referential entries: Lee’s GOD’S OWN COUNTRY (2017, 8.7/10); Céline Sciamma’s PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019, 8.4/10).