While I know many people loved writer/director Francis Lee's first full feature, God's Own Country, I found it rather dull. For me it was slow and bleak. I appreciated her attentiveness to the love between two men making a life together in a time and place where that isn't possible, but I still found it rather passionless, or maybe just too quietly apprehensive to truly inspire passion. Now she has turned her attention to an equally bleak lesbian relationship which in my mind feels about as unambitious in its pursuit of finding the magic in this connection between these women.
Ammonite focuses on the cold. The atmosphere is chilly, the film spelling that out for us visually and in the dialogue, but mostly in the interactions between Winslet's misanthrope and Ronan's waif. Lee's approach is to make them both so remote it's hard for us to see how they come together. I never felt the chemistry between them, never witnessed the spark. Maybe that's okay. Maybe it's not about that. Maybe it's about these women searching for and not truly finding the things missing for them but relying on it anyway. But in that case, the story is even more tragic than it appears.
But throughout the film kept its audience at arm's length, never truly letting us into whatever its characters are feeling. For me the story never resonated in a way that made it feel real. As I watched Winslet comb another beach and carve away at another stone, I just felt cold and lost.
Ammonite
Starring: Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Fiona Shaw, Gemma Jones, James McArdle
Writer/Director: Francis Lee
No comments:
Post a Comment