2/1/2024 0 Comments Ammonite scenes![]() Lee, who films rough labor with incredible tenderness, instead takes issue with Mary’s adversary: the gate-kept institution. Nor are we inclined to reduce her life to a quest for notoriety, foiled by Victorian paternalism. We are not made to observe Mary living out these well-documented instances of discovery and loss on-screen. It comes as a relief that Francis Lee is not a punishing filmmaker. Eventually, the British Museum showcased the creature under a plaque crediting the male owner’s name-not its girl-discoverer. Mary’s family would sell her ichthyosaur bones to make ends meet. In reality, Mary’s monumental contributions to paleontology and pre-Darwinian thought were either stolen or dismissed for decades: at eleven, she found the first ichthyosaur later, she assisted in identifying coprolite as feces and found two plesiosaurs. After a moment’s hesitation, Mary deadpans, “There once was a woman named Sally, who, enjoying the occasional dally, sat on the lap of a well-endowed chap, and cried, ‘Sir, you're right up my alley.’” The visitor asks her host to repeat a crude limerick. During an instance of postcoital haze, Charlotte lies in the tiny bed in a sweater and nothing else with Mary, who wears nothing except an alley cat’s smirk. These sex scenes, coordinated by the actresses, still possess Lee’s ferality and antipathy for the delicate. It is Charlotte’s appreciation for Mary’s work that finally gives the older woman license to treat her assistant as she does the tide pool crevasses that she excavates for shells. The film does not reach its romantic apex with sex, but with Charlotte assisting Mary in hauling a heavy fossil the scientist had dismissed as immovable into the cottage theirs is a grunting, grinning, mud-slicked union. As Charlotte rebounds, she expresses gratitude and new investment in Mary’s work. Molly keeps her promise to Roderick, nurturing Charlotte back to health with the herbal chest salve of a former love (Fiona Shaw). Our protagonist’s financial opportunity only leads to debt when Charlotte, already depressed, falls ill. Begrudgingly, she acquiesces to Charlotte’s husband. Mary, tasked with keeping her fossil shop’s rent paid and her ailing mother, Molly (Gemma Jones), alive, cautiously engages with such vultures to generate income. Here, unlike in God’s Own Country, there are rich men and their scientific institutions with which to reckon men who know less than her yet pass her first-hand field knowledge and discoveries off as their own. She grows reluctantly closer to that which irritates her when an admiring gentleman scientist Roderick (James McArdle) requests that Mary lodge his melancholic wife, Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan), as he departs on a six-week expedition. Unlike God’s Own Country’s men, seaside-dwelling Mary (Kate Winslet) is much more beholden to polite society’s postures. In Ammonite, Lee is guided by the same goal of showing emotional connection through labor’s brute strength, this time between women. “They are not people who sit around and talk about how they feel, or articulate particularly expansively on their emotions, position, or space,” he told TIFF in 2017. The impoverished blue-collar subject requires an embodied approach, as Lee empathizes. The connection, beautiful and wary, is both articulated by and contrasted with the graphic (and at times nauseating) nature of the work. ![]() In God’s Own Country (2017), the director’s first feature, two male farm hands fall in love during lambing season in the filmmaker’s own West Yorkshire. A male-identified filmmaker, Francis Lee visually appreciates passions that can be portrayed through physical interactions with nature work, in other words. Mary’s discoveries would only be recognized after her death. Yet no recognition was paid to scientific contributions by women in the Victorian era, and particularly women without institutional affiliation. She was a provincial woman among affluent men seeking the origins of prehistoric life. In 18th-century England, Mary furiously pawed through the mud. Existing centuries apart, the two are made for one another like mollusk and shell. That Francis Lee, a self-taught filmmaker of rural providence, would consider the autodidact fossil hunter Mary Anning a worthwhile subject comes as little surprise.
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