Ammonite - or, for those of a nautical bent, the nightmare of the Lee shore

This fortnight I turn film critic. Suze, her sister Diane and I recently went to watch ‘Ammonite’ at our local village cinema. The best part of the experience were the tubs of honeycomb hash icecream we had before the film started (there being no interval).

The marvellous cinematography of Dorset’s Jurassic Coast and the careful attention to period detail in the various settings fell far short of counterbalancing ‘Ammonite’s’ many faults.

Anning’s marginalisation by the scientific community of the time, on account of her gender, was given only superficial treatment and the debate of biblical literalism versus Darwinism and the fossil record (a hot topic at the time) was not even mentioned, let alone explored.

For the first half of the film, I wondered if the many characters had all taken a vow of silence – there was almost no dialogue as director Francis Lee unsuccessfully attempted to build atmosphere with a lot of loud knocking on doors, long, meaningless looks between the main characters and amplified sounds of nature; I tell you, if the sound of waves crashing on the shore on a moderately breezy day was really that loud, nobody would ever go down to the beach.

I thought I was a dab hand at whimsy, but Lee’s whims put me in the shade: the main focus of the film was Mary Anning’s lesbian relationship with Charlotte Murchison, something for which there is not a scintilla of historical evidence. To me, this is a gratuitous insult to the memory of a great pioneering natural scientist; not the suggestion that Anning may have just possibly been a lesbian (although one suspects it was simply an excuse to include a couple of semi-explicit sex scenes), but the unwarranted focus on her sexuality, whatever the orientation. I wonder if Lee would contemplate the same kind of treatment in a film about, say, Marie Curie; with the same wilful ignoring of her motivations and achievements, substituting instead a fictitious and prurient sexuality, just to make the point that, great scientist though she was, we mustn’t for a moment forget that she was a woman.

The title makes no sense at all; the fact that Mary Anning collected fossils being incidental to the filmmaker’s obsession with exploring the entirely conjectural possibility that she may have been a lesbian. It would have made as much sense if, instead of ‘Brassed Off’, that excellent film had been called ‘Flugel Horn’, or if ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ had been truncated to simply ‘Mandolin’.

Now I’m waiting for Lee to make ‘Grapeshot’ – a steamy account of Napoleon Bonaparte’s torrid homosexual affair with Marshal Ney, all to an eardrum-splitting soundtrack of horses’ neighs, jangling harness and the boom of a cannon now and again, with the odd exasperated reference to “Ce salaud de Wellington!”

While the seascapes in Ammonite were certainly breathtaking, the pace of the film was less so; Diane said she nearly went to sleep during it and on the pavement outside the cinema after the film, we heard one lady say it had been like “watching paint dry”. Well, perhaps Lee was trying to give us a sense of geological timescale, and at least in this he succeeded.

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