Ammonite (2020)

Directed by: Francis Lee | 120 minutes | biography, drama | Actors: Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Jones, Fiona Shaw, Claire Rushbrook, Alec Secareanu, James McArdle, Nick Pearse, Victoria Elliott, John Mackay, Mladen Petrov

She sells seashells by the seashore. This English tongue twister – comparable to the Dutch ‘The cat scratches the curls of the stairs’ – is attributed by many to Mary Anning (1799-1847). While the saying has been around much earlier, text definitely applies to Anning. In the first half of the nineteenth century she scoured the beaches of Dorset in southern England in search of fossils. Initially because they could earn the penniless Mary a nice pocket money, but later also because fossils contain important information for biology and geology. She was successful: at the age of twelve she found a fossil of a prehistoric sea creature that can still be admired in the British Museum. She was never educated: because scientists regularly stopped by her shop to buy one of her fossils and Mary spoke and discussed extensively with them, she knew a lot about it and realized the scientific value of her important finds. But in the nineteenth century it was not for women to meddle in science; many of Mary’s finds were appropriated by male colleagues, who made beautiful decorations with them. So there was no recognition at the time; it was only much later that it was realized what important work the British had done and how clever it was that she had taught herself how to document her finds.

In ‘Ammonite’ (2020) by director Francis Lee – named after the ammonites, the recognizable spiral shells consisting of several chambers – Mary Anning is portrayed subdued and sober by Kate Winslet. It’s the 1840s. Mary lives with her ailing mother Molly (Gemma Jones) in a dilapidated cottage in the southern English coastal town of Lyme Regis, carved into the chalk cliffs. There she runs a shop, where she sells the fossils she searches for on the beach every morning. And when she doesn’t find any prehistoric remains, she collects shells and fröbelts for nice souvenirs. That sounds nice, but make no mistake: Mary has a hard life, which is as gray and drab as the rain clouds that hang permanently over Lyme Regis. One day, geologist Roderick Murchison (James McArdle) visits her shop, followed by his wife Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan). Murchison wants to go fossil hunting on the beach with Mary, but Mary isn’t immediately thrilled. Because doesn’t he just want to watch her tricks and tricks, just like all the others?

No, then Charlotte. Mary’s money problems are strange to her, but she doesn’t seem particularly happy either. She looks pale – and did she just cry? She suffers from ‘melancholy’, according to her husband. Is it because of her wish to have children that is not being answered? Now that Roderick is going on an expedition for six weeks, and he can’t and won’t take her in tow, he hopes to leave his wife with Mary. The sea air will do her good, he thinks. Charlotte will indeed thrive during her time in Lyme Regis, but not necessarily with the fresh sea air. It is above all the presence of Mary that makes her revive. And that’s mutual. Usually so closed off as an oyster, who hides behind her daily routines and devotes herself to her work so as not to have to face the confrontation with her miserable existence, caring for the vulnerable Charlotte actually sees a number of rays of light penetrate her armor.

Precisely in small gestures – Charlotte’s slender, urban, manicured hands fiddling with rocks and stones, for example – director Francis Lee shows how these two women grow together and develop a friendship, and even more. Lee made an overwhelming impression in 2017 with his feature film debut ‘God’s Own Country’, about the budding love between a stiff and hardened farmer’s son and a Romanian migrant worker. As in that film, the landscape also plays a crucial role in ‘Ammonite’. Where in ‘God’s Own Country’ it was the endless green plains and mysterious moors of Yorkshire, here the imposing but jagged rocky coast of Dorset and the rough and cold sea shine. Lee is the art of bringing a landscape to life in such a way that you not only see it, but also hear and feel it. The bitter wind, the salty sea air, the rustling of the surf; as if you are there yourself. Winslet plays with conviction a woman who belongs in this landscape, and who is hardened by it; as layered as the ammonite from the title and as closed as a shell. Silent (dialogues are sparse in ‘Ammonite’), toiling, withdrawn. She doesn’t necessarily need words to make her character a flesh and blood human being. That blood is slowly but surely warmed up by the equally strong Ronan, who offers excellent resistance as vulnerable Charlotte.

Whether a romance really blossomed between Anning and Murchison doesn’t matter much. Lee has used his creative liberties to create a powerful, universal story that explores the friendship and love between two completely different women in humble but brisk strokes of the pen. In addition, with Winslet and Ronan, he has two of the best actresses of their generation at his disposal who are at the top of their game. But above all, Lee proves once again that he can bring the characteristic English landscape to life: the chilly and jagged south coast heats up considerably in ‘Ammonite’, up to and including a red-hot climax that for both women is not only literally but also figuratively a means liberation.