He has patience for his characters, so when Charlotte finally rips off her wedding ring to dig through black mud to unearth a giant fossil with Mary, the release of tension is tangible, and exciting.īut where this mixture of nature and budding romance is blistering in the contemporary queer God’s Own Country, Ammonite is noticeably more glacial, and perhaps that’s the point. Lee’s a patient director, never diving head first into lust. Like the rough waves splashing against the cliffs, Lee molds Mary and Charlotte’s relationship by breaking them down, eroding their differences so the two can come together and feel alive, a scapegoat for their melancholy. Lee builds his characters around nature, whether it be Mary’s rough tumble down a cliffside as she grasps for a giant ammonite fossil, or Charlotte’s attempt to bathe in the biting chill of the English Channel so she can wash away her post-miscarriage depression. In the structure of this period biopic, he fabricates a romance between Mary and her friend Charlotte Murchison (Ronan), filling in the gaps between the fossilized silt, sand, and bones and building a relationship between two individuals who find each other when they are at their most desperate and lonely because of crushing circumstance. With his second feature, Ammonite, his vision is less craggy and more smooth, like the fossils his subject, eminent Victorian paleontologist Mary Anning (Winslet), hunts for alongside the cliffs of Dorset, England. In his first feature, God’s Own Country, he takes the everyday landscape of a farm and folds in a cozy, muddy romance between two men. Director Francis Lee is fascinated with the earth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |