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Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan share a disastrous wedding night in On Chesil Beach |
Director: Dominic Cooke
Cast: Saoirse Ronan (Florence Ponting), Billy Howle (Edward
Mayhew), Emily Watson (Violet Ponting), Anne-Marie Duff (Marjorie Mayhew),
Samuel West (Geoffrey Ponting), Adrian Scarborough (Lionel Mayhew), Anton
Lesser (Reverend Woollett), Tamara Lawrence (Molly)
There are few things sadder than the road not taken. And few
novels capture the tragedy of a single moment in time shaping a whole life’s
course better than Ian McEwan’s On Chesil
Beach. This slim novella starts as a romance but quickly collapses into a
tragedy – and this film adaptation, adapted beautifully by McEwan, hums with a
constant sense of sadness and gloom.
Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle) is a middle-class boy and
would-be historian who falls in love with promising violin player Florence
Ponting (Saoirse Ronan) in 1962, after they both graduate from their respective
universities with first class degrees. But their wedding night is a disaster –
Edward is in tune with the swinging sixties and flushed with sexual desire,
Florence is still living with the values of the 1950s and extremely uncomfortable
with sex (possibly connected to a past relationship with her domineering
father, expertly played by Samuel West). A conversation on Chesil beach leads
to a ruinous split – and for Edward a life of regret.
On Chesil Beach is
a film that expertly demonstrates contrasts – between the oppressive 1950s and
the more bohemian 1960s (sexual freedom, socialism, nuclear disarmament), and
the skilful use of the rock ‘n’ roll favoured by Edward and the classical music
that is central to Florence’s life. Dominic Cooke’s low-key, carefully
structured film wonderfully balances these themes, showing throughout how
cultural, social and relationship clashes can cause pain and strife.
Sex is of course the problem. At first nervous romance seems
to be the theme – but it’s actually physical misunderstanding and incompatibility.
Cooke’s film cuts back and forth from the wedding evening to fill in the gaps
of their timeline that have brought Edward and Florence to this point, and explain
their psychology going into this wedding night that will shape their lives.
Edward has no understanding of Florence’s nerves and fear about sex, while
Florence fails to effectively articulate these feelings in a way that Edward
can understand or sympathise with.
Essentially, it’s a tragedy about a failure of communication
and how hasty, ill thought out words and decisions can shatter an otherwise
extremely happy relationship. Because there is no doubt – and McEwan makes it even
clearer here than in the novella – of how this couple are perfectly suited
together. Cooke’s film captures the halcyon dreaminess of their courtship in
the giddy summer of 1962, in the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside. The film
hums with their immediate attraction and strong feelings for each other – while
also laying the groundwork of their failure to really and fully communicate
with each other. The sexual encounter between them is agonising in its
clumsiness, nerves, awkwardness, functionality and eventual total failure.
It works so well in these segments as both leads bring
expressive, empathy filled performances to the screen. Howle is very good as a
man struggling with his place in the world, who juggles bohemian ideals and
longings with a keen desire to be seen as “a man”, to be well regarded by
others. Ronan is also excellent as a young woman who in many ways is both ahead
of her time and left behind it, ambitious and forward thinking but oppressed
and terrified by physical contact. The tragedy is that she relaxes so much with
Edward, but can’t bring herself to voice her concerns, fears and tortured
history to him.
It’s that tortured history where the film leans a little too
hard. The book holds dark suggestions that Florence may have been abused by her
father, but in the film McEwan moves them from subtext into full-on text.
Samuel West is very good as this intimidating figure, but the explanation that
much of Florence’s sexual discomfort is directly related to ill-defined sexual
misdemeanours from her father feels slightly pat. Far more interesting is the
idea that she is simply scared of contact, and struggling to adapt the prim
1950s ideas she has been brought up with to the modern era.
But the film wants to give a deeper meaning to a drama that
is more interesting when it looks at troubled psychologies at a time when the
world was shifting from one generation to another. It remains a very slight
story – and even at 100 minutes it feels like it is stretching the content of
the novel – but also one that does carry a lot of emotional weight. The film’s
coda, set in 2007, leans a little too heavily on the actors now layered under
old-age pancake make-up (it’s noticeably not included in the novella, which
gives no information about Florence’s future life at all) but it carries a real
sense of sadness and loss for both characters, one of whom has seen their life
drift into nothingness, another who has achieved but still carries a sense of
sadness for a lost love. McEwan’s careful, elegant script captures a lot of
this small-scale tragedy and if the film is slight and at times a little too
obvious, it’s also able to induce a tear or two.
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