God's Own Country

 Year of Release:  2017

Director:  Francis Lee

Screenplay:  Francis Lee

Starring:  Josh O'Connor, Alec Secǎreanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart

Running Time:  105 minutes

Genre:  Drama, romance

John Saxby (O'Connor) an unhappy Yorkshire farmer lives and works on a farm owned by his ailing father (Hart), with whom John has a difficult relationship, and John's grandmother (Jones).  John deals with his angst by nightly binge drinking and casual sexual encounters with random men.  Against John's wishes, his father hires Gheorghe (Secǎreanu), a Romanian migrant worker, to help with the lambing season.  Despite John and Gheorghe's initial dislike of each other, they form an intense bond.

This is a film in which beauty and brutality, hope and despair exist cheek by jowl.  For all the lyrical shots of the beauty of nature, the film does not shy away from the often harsh realities of farming life.  John Saxby lives a bleak existence, forced to work the struggling family farm due to his father's ill health and his grandmother's age (his mother having seemingly ran out on the family), and his old friends having apparently gone off to University.  John finds release in drinking to oblivion and occasional rough joyless couplings with other men.  He is initially resentful of Gheorghe and subjects him to racist verbal abuse.  However Gheorghe is seemingly the only person who can reach him, and the tentative building of their relationship is genuinely moving.  Josh O'Connor is fantastic in the lead role.  Rarely being off the screen, he has to do a lot with very little, speaking volumes with just a fleeting facial expression or sudden downcast eyes.  Alec Secǎreanu is affecting as Gheorghe, again conveying a lot with very little, as someone who has been through hell, but still is open to kindness and tenderness.  In a post-Brexit Britain, where everything seems to be becoming more divided and more miserable, this is the kind of film that seems more and more essential.

Josh O'Connor and Alec Secǎreanu in God's Own Country

 

Ammonite

Year of Release:  2020

Director:  Francis Lee

Screenplay:  Francis Lee

Starring:  Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Jones, James McArdle, Alec Secăreanu, Fiona Shaw

Running Time:  118 minutes

Genre:  Romance

In the 1840s, fossil collector and palaeontologist Mary Anning (Winslet) lives in Lyme Regis with her sick, elderly mother Molly (Jones).  To make ends meet, Mary runs a small shop which sells fossils to tourists.  One day, geologist Roderick Murchison (McArdle) visits the shop with his melancholy young wife Charlotte (Ronan).  Murchison hires Mary to teach him about fossil collecting.  Murchison heads abroad for a six week expedition, paying a reluctant Mary to look after Charlotte.  During a morning fossil hunting expedition, Charlotte goes bathing the sea and becomes seriously ill.  The local doctor (Secăreanu) persuades Mary to nurse Charlotte.  Under Mary's care, Charlotte soon recovers, and the two develop a genuine, if tentative friendship, which grows into a passionate romance.

This powerful romantic drama, based on a true story, is one of the best new films that I have come across in a long time.  It's far away from the traditional "chocolate box" period drama.  There is a beauty here but it's of the most savage kind, most of the film is set on the Dorset coast, a cold, windswept place, pounded with rain.  As the grim, weatherbeaten Mary Anning, Kate Winslet has never been better, moving around the coast in the wind and rain, carefully selecting promising rocks, shells and fossils, and wrestling with mud and clay to excavate bones.  She is someone who doesn't say very much, and doesn't let her feelings show, preferring to let her feelings out in the journal she usually has with her, but manages to say a lot with just a glance.  Saoirse Ronan also gives a powerful performance as Charlotte Murchison.  Charlotte is a wealthy, but deeply unhappy woman, convalescing from something that is never quite revealed, with a husband who doesn't really seem to be that bothered with her.  Certainly not bothered enough not to go gallivanting across Europe for six weeks, leaving his ill wife alone with a complete stranger.  Saoirse Ronan's porcelain, fragile beauty works in counterpoint to the cold, rough beauty around her, and the very earthy Mary Anning.  As she grows more accustomed to her environment, Charlotte seems to begin to fit in more.  Mary is uncomfortable in the more genteel society that Charlotte is accustomed to being part of.  They attend a musical evening at the home of the doctor, and Charlotte fits right in with the ladies, while Mary is left alone, at the back, and she leaves early to walk home in the rain.  The romance between the two evolves gradually and convincingly.  As good as the other actors in the film are, especially Gemma Jones as Mary's ailing mother, it is almost a two hander, dominated entirely by the two central performances.  The film does have something to say about the position of women at the time.  It opens in the British Museum where a cleaning woman is scrubbing the floor, when she is rudely told to move out of the way, and a bunch of men put an ichthyosaur fossil that Mary had found on a table, and erase Mary's name off the accompanying card for the display and replace it with a man's name, and when Mary visits the British Museum she walks through a portrait gallery full entirely of portraits of white men in wigs.  Without wishing to give the ending away, I will say I was left wanting more.  It's rare to want a film to be longer than it is, in fact most of the time it's quite the opposite, but here I was left wanting to know more about these women and what becomes of them.  The tone moves between cold, bleak life, and the glow of friendship. love and the heat of passion, light and dark together.  

Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan in Ammonite