Ammonite

Directed by Francis Lee

Running time: 1hr58 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan star in Ammonite

There’s a moment toward the quiet, fragile-hearted end of Ammonite where director Francis Lee frames Kate Winslet’s face as if it were a painting. Not in the figurative sense, though Stéphane Fontaine’s intricately lit, rain-hued cinematography has been doing that throughout. But more directly: on a bittersweet, fish-out-of-water trip to London, pioneering female palaeontologist Mary Anning tours the British Museum, and we gaze upon her as she gazes upon the paintings. Her head turns just so, until it’s perfectly caught against one of the gallery’s framed historical portraits — its own picture of sorrow and pride, tied up in a solemn bonnet.

It’s a briefly breathtaking moment of pure, besotted portraiture, for a woman not accustomed to being looked at — either in her largely solitary personal life, or her professional one, where her work is appropriated or disregarded by pompous male peers. But it feels a while since we’ve really looked at Winslet this way, too. Since winning her hard-earned Oscar twelve years ago, she's either been sportingly sewn into ensembles or mismatched to garish starring vehicles that haven't played on her natural, somewhat regal flintiness as an actor. The exception, Todd Haynes' Mildred Pierce reworking, cast her as a ringer for Joan Crawford; Lee also sees in her something of that blend of ferocity and grand tragedy, albeit turned silently inward, as necessitated by the 19th-century provincial mores of grey, salty-aired Lyme Regis.

There, the stoically dour Mary finds fulfilment only in the fossils she uncovers on the hostile shoreline — until, that is, she's made a reluctant guardian of Charlotte (a fine Saoirse Ronan), a wealthy client's sickly wife, and a flicker of human desire alters everything from her gait to her dormant dimples. Winslet slowly illuminates Mary from the inside, passion fighting caution beneath that classically composed demeanour.

As in his debut God's Own Country, another slow-burning same-sex love story set against wild, forbidding English nature, Lee doesn't do swelling, rapturous romance: the sex is messy and visceral, the emotional connection complicated and compromised, written across anxious faces that rarely yearn and smile at once. Ammonite confirms his gifts, but it renews Winslet's: it's one of the performances of her career, more complex and soulfully felt than some of her most glitteringly rewarded roles, and matched to a film of equally tough-minded grace.

AMMONITE (2020) Written by Francis Lee | Shot by Stéphane Fontaine | Edited by Chris Wyatt

Available to watch on Prime US and BFI Player