LFF 2020: Ammonite
LFF2020Comparisons are to be made between Ammonite, Francis Lee’s sophomore feature, and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, which was released to unwavering critical acclaim last year. At least superficially, they seem to have been cut out of the same cloth: they are both period-set romantic dramas orbiting around two women and their tragically forbidden love. But while Sciamma’s film fires on all cylinders and delivers a stirring tornado of emotions, the same cannot be said about Lee’s latest effort. And it might be because Ammonite doesn’t really know what it wants to be.
Francis Lee chose to ground this narrative journey in fundamental reality and tethered its main character (portrayed by the ever-electric Kate Winslet) to a historical figure of Mary Anning. She lived in 19th century England and busied herself with excavating and studying prehistoric fossils prevalent on what is now known as Jurassic Coast of Britain. However, the film isn’t nearly as interested in delving into the heart-breaking story of why she never got to be the celebrated scholar she undeniably deserved to be, as it is manufacturing a love story out of an allegedly passionate friendship with one Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan). Thus, with the help of a handful of narrative conveniences and a solid pinch of dramatic licence, Francis Lee conjured a halfway house between a socially-relevant biopic about a mostly forgotten historical figure and a visually-daring steaming romance wanting to thrive on its intimacy and visual fervour.
Sadly, just as a halfway house is not a real house, Ammonite doesn’t really succeed at being either of the two possible cinematic creatures. As a natural consequence of trying to divide its attention between its two parallel strands of thematic focus, the filmmaker failed to give either of them justice. Granted, the film has its moments of profundity. It hints at an intention to join the conversation about the sad fact of scientific achievements made by female researchers throughout centuries were consistently and brutishly diminished, swept under the rug and often misappropriated because the scientific community was (and still continues to be) a boys’ club. This sentiment is mostly contained within Winslet’s character, who operates on a daily basis by attempting to suppress her own fury at the years of injustice she suffered being pushed around by men in top hats. To Francis Lee’s credit, he also managed to smuggle a few fleeting moments of purely visual commentary on the subject. Examples include an opening scene where one of Anning’s most famous findings has its label replaced by one conveniently stripping off her due credit, a short take where Anning walks through a corridor covered in portraits of notable scientific fellows who all happen to be male, as well as a clever insert shot of a magpie taking apart a snail shell – a bit of an inside joke satirising the highfalutin aspirations of paleontology as a field of scientific discovery.
Nevertheless, this process of periodically infusing the narrative with short jabs of cutting commentary never builds up enough momentum to leave the viewer with anything substantial to chew on. That’s because Ammonite also wants to add a few cents to a conversation about repressing one’s sexual identity and striving to find some fundamental happiness and belonging, however short-lived they may be. Unfortunately, because the gaze constantly shifts between Anning’s professional trials and the quietly smouldering romance between her and Charlotte Murchison, the result is completely unsettled. The film fails to coalesce around a melody which could stand a chance of delivering a climactic crescendo this film desperately requires to send the viewer home in emotional turmoil. Instead, Ammonite seems incidentally engineered to coast impotently and thus fails to leave the confines of the convention it was expected to subvert.
Painful as it is to admit, Francis Lee’s film is criminally underwhelming because a story with this much energy built into its narrative should never be boring. But it is. Flashes of visual acumen and the bravado of its leads notwithstanding, Ammonite is not the wholly original roar of filmmaking prowess it needs to be, but an ersatz of one. It is a me-too Portrait Of A Lady On Fire that unabashedly fails where Céline Sciamma succeeded so beautifully. Instead of a searing celebration of one of many unsung heroines of scientific advancement and a commentary on the long-suppressed queer emancipation, this film is a forgettable woke biopic that warped historical record to manufacture drama and then let that drama fizzle out like a can of pop left on a window sill on a hot July afternoon.
