On Chesil Beach | Little White Lies

On Chesil Beach

18 May 2018 / Released: 18 May 2018

A woman in a blue dress standing in a bedroom with a large red curtained bed, lamps, and luggage.
A woman in a blue dress standing in a bedroom with a large red curtained bed, lamps, and luggage.
4

Anticipation.

Saoirse Ronan is in it so we’re there.

3

Enjoyment.

Takes a focused, intense and awkward novel and attempts to retool it for mass consumption.

2

In Retrospect.

Something of a prestige slog.

Mar­i­tal woe plagues a young cou­ple hon­ey­moon­ing on the Dorset coast in this Ian McE­wan adaptation.

A lot of British com­e­dy cin­e­ma from the 1960s was pow­ered by the apoc­ryphal notion that we are a island of prigs, prudes and scardy­cats when it comes to sex. Rub­ber-faced Car­ry On… stal­wart Ken­neth Williams built a cot­tage indus­try out of blanch­ing in hor­ror at any­thing his com­i­cal­ly PC char­ac­ters would per­ceive as undue naugh­ti­ness. Dominic Cooke’s On Chesil Beach, adapt­ed from a dour novel­la by Ian McE­wan, trans­forms cul­tur­al myth into hard fact, fram­ing the mar­riage bed as not a venue for bawdy larks, but face-claw­ing torment.

It’s 1962 and Flo­rence (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward (Bil­ly Howle) are about to get hitched pri­or to hon­ey­moon­ing at the scenic shin­gle bank of the title. By rights, the pair should be extreme­ly loved up and excit­ed for the years of lust­ful frol­ick­ing they have ahead of them. In real­i­ty, it’s like they’ve both signed a two-way death pact and they’re work­ing out who’s going to chug the poi­son first.

Even though this is a sto­ry about youth­ful inno­cence taint­ed by bio­log­i­cal neces­si­ty, it is also one which may be tough for mod­ern view­ers to com­pre­hend. Sex is framed as a vio­lent inva­sion of pri­va­cy, a dis­gust­ing mode of gen­der-aligned tor­ment, and a vile dance learned through med­ical pam­phlets. Yet the film is not real­ly inter­est­ed in look­ing at phys­i­cal action, instead it is too busy admon­ish­ing a post­war gen­er­a­tion hung up on point­less tradition.

This is Cooke’s direc­to­r­i­al debut, though he arrives to film from a sto­ried and suc­cess­ful career in the­atre. Dur­ing the film’s ini­tial stages, with its bright and unshowy estab­lish­ing sequences buoyed by much admirably detailed pro­duc­tion design, the switch from stage to screen is all but unno­tice­able. Yet by the film’s pro­tract­ed, cos­mi­cal­ly over­wrought cli­max, you can almost see the foot­lights as the actors do their thing. It’s most­ly told in flash­back, detail­ing how the hap­py cou­ple reached this junc­ture of high anxiety.

The sto­ry goes out of its way to empha­sise the star-crossed nature of the pair­ing, and how Edward and Flo­rence through their inter­ests and pro­gres­sive world­view appear almost made for one anoth­er. He is brought up in a tum­ble­down cot­tage with a moth­er (Anne-Marie Duff) suf­fer­ing from a men­tal impair­ment, while she comes from fin­er stock, with par­ents who still see mar­riage an oppor­tu­ni­ty to expand and con­quer. And we all know that a love which defies parental con­sent is the great­est love of all.

Even though the source mate­r­i­al was writ­ten by a man, it’s fas­ci­nat­ing to think what the sto­ry would’ve looked liked had there been a woman behind the tiller. As is, there’s a clear imbal­ance of empa­thy towards the world­ly but ulti­mate­ly chival­rous male char­ac­ter at the expense of his more tim­o­rous, sen­si­tive female foil. The ques­tion at the cen­tre of it all, how­ev­er, is whether a bond of love can exist with­out phys­i­cal consummation.

And this philo­soph­i­cal conun­drum is answered in rather abrupt fash­ion, even though the film appears to quick­ly undo its own the­sis with a sop­py, tacked on coda. It’s a shame that the would-be lovers are moral­ly unequal per this story’s insid­i­ous­ly sub­jec­tive telling, as Edward’s anguish is seen as more deserv­ing of sym­pa­thy than Florence’s.

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