Fragments | Ammonite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Queer Films and Class
"Ammonite does not only excavate the possibility for queerness into Mary Anning’s life, but also is attentive to the restraints that would’ve inflected it."
J. has rightly pointed out that, among other things, the transition in this piece need work. Certainly there’s more one could say as well (the different contexts of Mary and Marianne’s professions, etc.)! But I think this is as far as I’m going to take it for now. For you, N.:
“That one was special,” Mary Anning (Kate Winslet, exceptional) murmurs. She is bent over a newfound fossil with her lover, Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), but speaking of her first famous find: an ichthyosaur skeleton she discovered when she was only 11 years old. “We couldn’t keep it,” Mary explains. “It was years worth of food, rent, clothing.” Now all she has left is her drawing of the skeleton, which she condemns—“Child’s hand”—it does not do her relic justice. There is a raw, uncharacteristic openness to Mary’s admissions, the suggestion of heartbreak.
It’s not the last heartbreak Francis Lee’s Ammonite (2020) will explore. When it circulated through social media, many disparaged that it was yet more of the “same” lesbian romance with which audiences were becoming increasingly familiar. A period drama, two white women, longing looks on a beach. While broad strokes for comparison, even after Ammonite’s release, many assert Lee’s film is in competition with Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). But to insist Ammonite lives in the shadow of Portrait does each a disservice. With great precision, Lee complements Sciamma’s work, presenting a nuanced look at how power moves unexpectedly in relationships and desire, and the way class is integral to shaping our understanding of both.
In Ammonite and Portrait, the lovers are allowed a reprieve from the influence of men. Héloïse's Breton isle is devoid of them, and the few male figures in Ammonite are easily dismissed. Class is, of course, present in Portrait: Sophie, Marianne, and Héloïse all occupy a different status, and are brought together by Héloïse's betrothal, the exchange and consolidation of wealth through marriage. In an interview with The Independent, Sciamma addresses the omnipresent centrality of the male gaze in cinema. The characters in Portrait are not outside of the patriarchy, but allowed to explore who they might be, what they might feel, when the system briefly averts its eyes. Left to their own devices, the women suggest that these positions could be undone as easily as any dress: they eat together, and Marianne and Héloïse support Sophie through an abortion. Their shared femininity brings them together; they are depicted as having more in common than not.
“A relationship is about inventing your own language... That’s what you mourn for when you’re losing someone you love. This language you’re not going to speak with anybody else,” Sciamma notes in the same interview. In Portrait, the development of this language is the seduction, one performed through pages and paint. Héloïse allows herself to be viewed, and Marianne's success in capturing the lady’s likeness demonstrates a true understanding of her subject. Later, Héloïse rests a mirror between her thighs, so Marianne might capture herself. Here, there is a fusion of painter and subject, an achievement of mutuality, the cementing of a secret language they speak with quiet fluency.
And it is a language that is not only achieved, but maintained. Even after they are separated, messages are sent and received: in a subsequent portrait, Héloïse’s draws attention to page 28, where Marianne’s self-portrait hides. What Portrait of a Lady on Fire chooses to bring to foreground is a compelling examination on how art can facilitate lasting connection, and what the imagination might light upon, and come to love, unrestrained from the constraints of normative masculinity, heterosexuality.
While Sciamma inserts a new lesbian fantasy into the past, Lee starts from the facts of history, imbuing lesbian possibility into two of England’s notable women of science—palaeontologist Mary Anning and geologist Charlotte Murchison.
Charlotte, dressed in embellished gowns, is a bright contrast to the Annings’ sparse home. The walls are grey and the light is dim. They cannot afford to hold onto much; you can count their personal effects on your hands. And though their romance swells with little resistance, there are other signs that Charlotte comes from a distant world. She’s at a loss for how to support a working class home, floundering at peeling vegetables and fetching coal. Instead, she is at home at social functions Mary isn’t, conversing easily and animatedly with Mary’s former lover, Elizabeth Philpot (Fiona Shaw, radiating charm).
“I wasn’t the enemy, but it often felt like I was,” Elizabeth tells Mary, later, reflecting on the collapse of their relationship. “I tried,” Mary says. Gently, Elizabeth rebuffs her: “No, I don’t think you did. Not really. You seemed to do everything you could to be distant. Eventually I just stopped trying.” The brilliance of Ammonite is it suggests both may be true. They may have both tried, but not in ways the other understood. Elizabeth’s own wealth may be less extravagant than Charlotte’s, but it’s no less integral to the vantage-point from which she views the world. The Philpot home is a mere walk away from Mary’s, but appears as an oasis; Elizabeth’s garden is the film’s first grand display of light and colour, so vibrant one might squint or avert their eyes after adjusting to the Annings’ gloom. When Mary tries to purchase a salve, Elizabeth offers it for free. It’s a kindness, but one which simultaneously and subtly reveals how inconsequential Mary’s money is to Philpot. Mary insists, pressing the coins firmly into her ex’s hands. Shaw tosses the coins in the air blithely, charismatic and careless all at once.
Generous with their money and their words, Elizabeth and Charlotte speak easily in one shared register, while Mary and her mother speak in another. Over the course of the film, one comes to understand the eight ceramic dogs Molly cleans routinely, as though fixated, each represents a child she has lost. When Mary misses a session, Jones conveys a pained sense of disorientation: “I had to start the babies on my own,” Molly trembles to her daughter. Affection manifests in unspoken, private rituals. Nothing is casually kept or given. With impeccably controlled displays of both defensive abrasion and vulnerability, Winslet conveys the difficulty Mary has in expressing her desires. After all, constraint has guided Mary’s life. Whatever she surfaces, she may not be able to keep.
It is a gulf of understanding neither of Mary’s lovers seem capable of crossing. When Mary visits Charlotte in her London home, her house overwhelms: there are maids, painted walls, cabinets and cabinets of curios. Charlotte surprises Mary with a furnished room, a dresser full of new clothes. In the grand scheme, it costs Charlotte very little to purchase Mary an entirely new life. Mere scenes ago, Mary forgoes a desperately needed £16 in order to hold onto a mirror Charlotte helped decorate. Suddenly the chasm between their lives, and what they each believe constitutes a life, is exposed, and it is vast. “I can’t bear to think of you suffering out on those beaches in all weather,” Charlotte says, revealing that she primarily sees Mary not as she is, but as Charlotte believes she ought to be. They may be sympathetic or pitying, infatuated or sentimental, but neither Elizabeth nor Charlotte seem to fully understand the material conditions of Mary’s life, how it might govern how she expresses her desire, or its inherent worthiness. Without this, the language of both loves flounders, unsustainable; to Charlotte, Mary decides she has nothing more to say.
At the end of Portrait, Marianne watches Héloïse become overwhelmed by a piece of music Marianne once played for her, years ago. Héloïse does not see Marianne, but she is seen, understood. Shared feelings from their past surfaces through the music and connects them across time and space. In Ammonite’s final scene, Mary reunites with her ichthyosaur, now kept in the British Museum. Here, at last, Dustin O'Halloran and Volker Bertelmann’s gentle, romantic theme swells. Mary crouches near, tender, wishing to be close. When she looks up, she sees Charlotte on the other side of the glass. The barrier between them finally made visible. They look at each other, unsure of what, precisely, is being reflected back.
For centuries, when imagining the contours of a fossil’s life—how it would’ve looked and moved—paleoartists deferred to an anatomically rigorous understanding. They wrapped the bones in plausible musculature, scales. What they failed to consider were some of the more delicate coverings, materials not always preserved over time: fat, feathers, fur. Ammonite does not only excavate the possibility for queerness into Mary Anning’s life, but also is attentive to the restraints that would’ve inflected it. It treats Anning’s lifestyle with both romance and dignity, suggesting understanding one’s constraints is key to understanding its freedoms, the passions and skills one refuses to compromise. Though there are superficial similarities, both Ammonite and Portrait of a Lady on Fire render lesbian desire in different contexts, teasing out different challenges and opportunities. While there’s undoubtedly room for greater diversity, one does not benefit from homogenizing these two distinctive, carefully crafted films. In both their differences and their similarities, Ammonite and Portrait speak compellingly to each other, arranging different fragments of desire, class, patriarchy and profession, resulting in a conversation that feels substantial and complicated, suffused with the possibility of greater understanding.
OF NOTE:
At the beginning of Ammonite, I made a joke that it was an ASMR movie (ocean sounds, scraping and cleaning of fossils), so much so that, at times, the sounds of nature or work overpower the actual dialogue. There were bits I didn’t hear: Mary and Charlotte on the beach, Elizabeth’s words as Mary hurries away from her garden. One of the big ones is when we watch Mary while she watches Charlotte and Elizabeth speak; their laughter is heard over the concert piece, but their actual conversation is entirely obscured. We can only make assumptions. At the start, I wondered if this would be one of the film’s flaws or frustrate me, but by the end I came to think it very appropriate, and added to the central theme of miscommunication with which Ammonite is grappling.
I, too, would be this visibly stressed if Fiona Shaw was being charming at my party date.
As is thematically appropriate, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is interesting in and in developing certain aesthetics around the (cis) female body and lesbian sexuality. Ammonite, in a way a see very complementary to capturing the realities of Anning’s life, is very straightforward re: bodies and sexuality (pissing on the beach, the multiple sex scenes). Which is not say Ammonite is artless, just interested in (skillfully) capturing a different perspective. I find neither “fetishizing” of lesbianism, and think it’s nice to have both approaches.
There may be something more to say re: the role of nature in Ammonite, but I’m not sure I have any coherent to say about it. The coastline is integral to Anning, as is the garden to Elizabeth. I’m constantly thinking about how arresting it is. The swing, in particular, is quite a clever shot, merging nature with the luxury of abundance and, arguably, recreation that Elizabeth Philpot posseses.
It’s probably equally worthwhile to dive into the other “mainstream” white lesbian period piece that’s widely beloved and held up as a comparison: Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015). Although I would also call those comparisons very different at best. Carol is also very interested in aesthetics and the constraints on the titular character’s life. Class, and even just wealth, in 1950s America operates very differently. (The fact that it is explicitly a Christmas movie is also part of this.) But potentially something to be said here of the very different receptions and missions of Ammonite and Carol, which are both directed by white gay men.
I suppose it will surprise no one, and least of all you, that apprently all I really wanted to talk about was cottagecore! Fiona Shaw. Thank you for your time. Amen.
