On Chesil Beach Cert: 15 1hr 50m
Sex was invented in 1963, according to the poet Philip Larkin, which may have been a little late for him but certainly explains why Ian McEwan based On Chesil Beach in 1962. Because this is a tale, a tragedy even, of sexual incompetence.
I don’t always get on with McEwan’s books, and when I read the 2007 novella I found it a slight, cold and somewhat unconvincing affair. But the new film version, which McEwan has adapted himself and co-produces, is just wonderful, albeit in a breaking-your-heart, blinking-back-the-tears kind of way.
Up on the screen I found I could totally believe what I found so hard to accept in the book: that lives really can turn on a single moment, be it of anger, humiliation or shame.
On Chesil Beach breathes new life into its source material, following Florence (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward (Billy Howle) as they struggle with sexual freedom and societal expectations
Decades later you look back on such moments, as this clever film invites us to, wondering whether if you’d played things differently, more maturely perhaps, life might have taken another path… Which, I suppose, is just another way of saying On Chesil Beach is a film for proper grown-ups.
It’s tempting to go into immediate raptures about the acting, which is undeniably wonderful. But that wouldn’t be fair because this is a quietly moving triumph right across the board – from McEwan’s beautifully pared-back screenplay, through the gloriously evocative production design (look out for the melon slice and glacé cherry served as a chillingly authentic period starter) to the effortless storytelling from director Dominic Cooke, a theatre man making a stunning feature-film debut. Everything works here, even if it takes a little while to realise how well.
The story is a seemingly simple one of boy meets girl. He, Edward (Billy Howle, who was in another fine literary film adaptation, Julian Barnes’s The Sense Of An Ending), comes from an academic but modest rural background and has just got a first in history. She, Florence (Saoirse Ronan), has just got a first too, although hers is in her passion, music, which provides a means of escape from her snobbish, domineering parents.
Their romantic adventure begins in Oxford, but the early sexual omens are not good. Edward and Florence are a fine-looking couple and are clearly in love, but even their kissing is clumsy
They meet in Oxford at a CND meeting; he a little drunk and handsomely dishevelled, she flame-haired, beautiful and instantly enraptured. Their romantic adventure has begun.
Already we know where it leads, as the film begins on their wedding day, as they settle nervously into their stuffy seaside hotel overlooking Dorset’s Chesil Beach. Their wedding night awaits but first they must endure a comedy hotel dinner, served in their room by a pair of clownish and over-intrusive waiters practising their ‘silver service’.
But the early sexual omens are not good. Edward and Florence are a fine-looking couple and clearly deeply in love but even their kissing is clumsy. Which is odd because I’m pretty sure that while sex may have not been invented until 1963, snogging definitely had, along with what was known as ‘heavy petting’.
But not by this couple, you get the impression, despite Edward’s enthusiastic but unskilled ardour.
It’s tempting to go into raptures about the acting, which is undeniably wonderful, but this is a quietly moving triumph across the board and a stunning feature film debut for Dominic Cooke
Ronan, whose first big break came at 13 in another McEwan adaptation, Atonement, and who just seems to be getting better and better, is sensationally good here, delicately conveying Florence’s charms and contradictions.
This is a young woman who is calm, kind, captivating but deceptively tough and demandingly committed to her music (she leads a high-quality string quartet). Only occasionally does she allow just a hint of a long- buried dark secret. But what is it?
Edward’s problem is more obvious. Ever since she was struck by a train door, his bohemian, art-loving mother has been brain-damaged, albeit in a way that leaves her dancing naked around the garden or frantically sticking pictures into scrapbooks that only she can understand. Anne-Marie Duff is an uninhibited joy in the role and the scene where she is gently sorted out by Florence is a touching delight.
Before the film’s release there were reports of at least one festival screening being punctuated by laughter as the story, after a truly heartbreaking scene on Chesil Beach, jumps forward 45 years to 2007 and suddenly two young actors are playing characters almost three times their age, heavily dependent on hair, make-up and prosthetics.
I was braced for disaster but here is just a beautifully poignant scene about regret in a wonderful film that should be one of the British-made highlights of the year.
SECOND SCREEN
Deadpool 2 (15)
Rating: 
Jeune Femme (15)
Rating: 
It’s barely three weeks since Avengers: Infinity War was released, yet already the next Marvel superhero film is upon us, albeit in the form of the sardonic, super-self-aware, yes, even smug Deadpool 2, the second film in a relentlessly wisecracking series that is meant to be funnier, sexier and more violent than more mainstream Marvel franchises.
Which presumably is why its predecessor took almost $800 million at the global box office and why this has arrived with almost indecent haste.
I’m a big Ryan Reynolds fan but I wasn’t bowled over by the first film and I like this one even less, despite his motor-mouthed, Tony Stark-style performance in the title role as the pizza-faced superhero who just can’t be killed but does enjoy slaying others.
True, I loved the idea behind Domino (Zazie Beetz), whose so-called superpower is good luck, but I got confused and then bored by a story that ties this franchise ever closer to the X-Men. That said, I’m sure its target audience will love it.
Despite his motor-mouthed, Tony Stark-style performance, even Ryan Reynolds (above) fails to elevate a confusing and boring storyline in Deadpool 2, also starring Josh Brolin as Cable
Jeune Femme is a demanding French film about a vulnerable and highly strung young woman, Paula (Laetitia Dosch), whose Paris-based life threatens to unravel after the break-up of a decade-long relationship with an older man. She has nowhere to live, no money and no job. The prickly Paula, who tells lies more readily than she tells the truth, is not an easy woman to like.
But if you’re in the market for this sort of challenging, subtitled thing, it’s worth sticking with, as Dosch is excellent and, surprisingly, we end up somewhere modestly life-affirming and upbeat.