Reel Life: Women in Love

Giving the audience an impression about their relationship, Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan) tells Mary Anning (Kate Winslet): “You look after me like a baby.”

The same sex romance in Ammonite (currently playing on BookMyShow Stream), between a bored, lonely, ill and depressed housewife and the reclusive palaeontologist devoted to her insular world of fossils and stones, begins on this rather paradoxical note of care and compassion than raging passion.

Mary lives in Lyme Regis with her mother, collecting fossils from the sea-shore at low tide and running a shop for her priceless collection of relics. Geologist Roderick Murchison visits her, hoping to collaborate and learn with her as his informal mentor. An expedition to Europe forces him to leave his ailing wife Charlotte back alone at Lyme with the hope that the sea air would help her get stronger and that Mary would take her under her wings.

Meanwhile, she wants neither an apprentice, nor an invalid in her secluded life. However, a sudden health emergency makes it imperative for her to take responsibility of the sickly woman she barely knows. A sudden start of a relationship, every beat of which feels foreseeable as the story moves along.

The forbidden love of Mary & Charlotte starts with stolen glances and slow stoking of emotions but predictably the distant and the discreet leads on to unbridled lust and profligate passion. The unconstrained feelings that Mary and Charlotte have for each other, eventually liberate them from their respective circumscribed worlds.

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While the jury is still out on how faithful director Francis Lee has been in depicting real life Mary’s sexuality, it’s hard not to place this mid-19^th century story set in Britain in relation with two other such queer period sagas—Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire based in late-18^th century France and Wash Westmoreland’s Colette set between 1893 and 1905 in Paris and Saint Sauveur.

The passion between the aristocrat Heloise (Adele Haenel) and painter Marianne (Noemie Merlant) in Portrait of a Lady on Fire is poetic, tender and graceful. Colette is a coming-of-age tale of a young, feisty French author, breaking away from the toxicity of a man to embrace her queerness and her tender love for a woman who is quite her opposite. In Ammonite there is a raw earthiness to the relationship between Mary and Charlotte, quite like the landscape of the place in which it is set—the jutting cliffs by the roaring sea.

Like the other two films, Ammonite is also centred entirely on women with men remaining on the periphery, even if they might be the agent provocateurs of the tales. Like the other two films, it is an acute character and relationship study. Like them it soars with the help of the individual acting prowess and uninhibited interactions of its lead players. Like them, the focus on sexuality dovetails into an active engagement with women’s issues. Like in the other two films, Ammonite is placed at the intersection between feminist and queer politics.

“Your husband left you”, Mary tells Charlotte bluntly about the abandonment. A male doctor tries to put a wincing Mary in her place: “A woman’s position is to care for her fellow sister”.

A conversation between Charlotte and Mary looks at the enforced burden of motherhood they have to deal with. Charlotte is pained at her childlessness; Mary hasn’t had any children of her own even as her mother lost eight children. “I have my work. I don’t need children,” she tells Charlotte.

Then there is the underlining assertion—that of the lack of rightful place for a brilliant woman in a world dominated by men. In Ammonite you have men buying Mary’s outstanding “discoveries”, but for a cheap price. They easily claim credit for something which truly belongs to her. And then, one fine day, Charlotte steps in as Mary’s ally and proxy agent to demand—politely and without a sense of confrontation—what she truly deserves than what she is dished out as some sort of a favour.

Clearly, these are women way ahead of their times, for whom the relationship that they share is not just about love and longing as much as it is about sisterhood and solidarity.

Ammonite then is not just about a woman in love with another woman but also women helping each other to find a voice and a space of their own.

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