But when it comes to the growing closeness between Mary and Charlotte, the class implications of their relationship and the general framing of a world where women and their authorship are sidelined or dismissed, the closer parallel is 2019’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The film’s unsentimental view of an eccentric nineteenth-century household recalls Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner. There are other characters and relationships the reality of which we are left to unearth, including the grunting but close bond between Mary and her mother, and the tension between Mary and an older acquaintance (Fiona Shaw), who lives locally. The strong suggestion is that she’s had a devastating miscarriage, although the script is careful with the manners and mores of the time: it’s not something that anyone would dare mention. Charlotte’s chirpy-cum-irritating fossil-fancying husband identifies Mary, who lives with her mother (Gemma Jones), as someone who can look after Charlotte for a fee, while he travels and she recovers from a bout of ‘mild melancholia’. Mary’s life of windswept fossil-hunting is disrupted by the arrival of the younger, wealthier, married and clearly unwell Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan). Or, at least, she’s a version of Anning created by British writer-director Francis Lee ( God’s Own Country), whose earthy spin on her life is mostly imagined from fragments of evidence, like an archeologist conjuring up flesh-and-blood stories from dinosaur bones. Kate Winslet is Lyme Regis’s famous fossil collector Mary Anning, tough and unsmiling. Sparks take a long time to fly in the careful, quiet, tense Ammonite, a lesbian love story set on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast in the mid-nineteenth century.
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