In the Flesh: Ammonite

There’s something so distinctly dykey about Ammonite, something in its obsessive focus on labor and chores, on feet and piss and clothes and all the things we half-understand to be proxies for the elusive concept of the beloved which hews closer to The Duke of Burgundy with its bondage chests and oral watersports than the staid, unsexy suggestiveness of, say, The Favourite, which only touches horniness when it’s actively trying to avoid it. Perhaps it’s the sense that its women have been shunted together, unwanted in the world of men, or the greedy sensualism of the sex scenes between Mary (Kate Winslet) and Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan), replete with face-sitting and fingerbanging and fumbling, eager masturbation, or the clever way in which the film balances the power dynamics of the dreaded age gap with the much more material ones inherent to cross-class fucking. Whatever it is, there is a gooey, dirty quality of realness to Francis Lee’s movie which sets it apart from quieter, more “respectable” lesbian period dramas.

Ammonite is also full of sickness, depression, grief, and the shadows of dead children, an inescapable part of the demimonde of Victorian womanhood, especially among the lower classes. The porcelain miniatures Mary’s mother (Gemma Jones, whose 1971 turn as Madeleine De Brou in The Devils has been unfairly ignored) keeps to remind her of the eight babies she lost hover like gravestones in the background of many of the film’s interiors. There’s a lovely depth to Lee’s shot compositions, rooms full of detail and workstations rich with minute activity. His respect for the work high society prefers to keep invisible is one of the film’s most bracing aspects; it opens on a nameless maid scrubbing the floor of the British Museum only to be scolded out of the way by men carting in a fossil the credit for the discovery of which they are in the process of robbing from a young girl of neither wealth nor station.

Lee’s devotion to depicting work in all its backbreaking intensity and grinding, endless struggle animates Ammonite in a way few period pieces — which all too often replicate the aristocracy’s preference for invisible servants — manage, bringing the Lyme Regis and London of the 1840s to throbbing, cacophonous life without the faintest trace of artifice. Winslet and Ronan are completely immersed in the film’s setting as well, so believably of their time and place it’s easy to forget you’re watching actors at all. Winslet is a particular delight as the gruff, unfriendly, workaholic Mary Anning, equal parts bristling and vulnerable. The two women are electrifying together, tender and desperate, the film’s final moments almost unbearable as we watch their foibles and the vast gulf of their class division threaten to destroy their connection forever. And there Ammonite leaves us, hanging in that lack of resolution — an ending as well-suited as its period U-Hauling to a sisterhood which has learned to live with sudden loss and wild, explosive love.