Much of the detail in Ammonite is derived from this kind of maternal melodrama: romance kindled through caregiving. Although not so explicit as the lesbian mother-daughter dynamic in recent films such as 2016’s The Handmaiden (in which the protagonist Sook-hee says she wishes she could give her lover Hideko her milk, as they suck one another’s nipples), nor Carol, in which the eponymous character’s lover is styled to look uncannily like her daughter. In the tradition of the lesbian film, these differences are often reconciled with an oedipal undercurrent, or “mummy issues”, to put it crassly. Mary leads a life of work and Charlotte a life of leisure. In this case, Mary is old and Charlotte is young. Starring Kate Winslet as Mary Anning and Saoirse Ronan as her young and wealthy lover Charlotte Murchison, Ammonite, like the films that came before it, relies on a narrative of difference. “Working with two lovely female leads, Stéphane wanted a textured feel to the lighting that would enhance the beauty on screen.”
Ammonite’s brief was for “a very soft and gentle approach”, Andy Cole, the film’s gaffer, recently revealed. Its vision is a direct contrast to the pastoral brutality of his debut – a love story between two male farmers, with images of hands glistening with mucus, dripping spit, half-living calves shot dead in the head. Inspired by correspondence between the 19th-century paleontologist Mary Anning and her female friends, Lee told Entertainment Weekly that he “was fascinated to set this film in a period that was totally patriarchal and where women were completely owned by their fathers or their husbands”. Now comes Ammonite, Francis Lee’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed debut God’s Own Country, which seems to tick off almost every box of today’s sapphic film checklist. In all of these films, lesbianism conveniently provides a doorway out of patriarchy and the limitations placed on women. We were also introduced to the life of Lizzie Borden and her affair with her live-in maid in Lizzie – as very enticingly played by Chloë Sevigny and Kirsten Stewart. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s affair was beautified by Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki in Vita & Virginia. 2018’s Wild Nights With Emily dramatised the life and imagined romance between Emily Dickinson and childhood friend Susan Gilbert. The same interminable foreplay (because this kind of film is usually hinged on at least one sex scene) has been applied to a surge of recent films that have reimagined female historical figures across the lesbian continuum.
Photograph: Allstar/Wild Bunch/Sportsphoto Ltd Interminable foreplay … Blue Is the Warmest Colour. The erotic and romantic ache of Carol is generated from across-the-room looks and sudden touches. In 2013’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour, the camera hovers over the lovers’ faces so intimately that you can see the spit as they kiss, the pores on their cheeks, the ecstatic boredom in their eyes. In these films, the action is silently displayed on faces and behind eyes, before it’s finally loosed in the form of a long, drawn-out sex scene. A sensorium of touch and taste, the space between bodies, and the yearning therein. For at least the past half-decade (since the release of Todd Haynes’ adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Carol) that image may look something like this: a period drama with an oedipal understory, chronically white, a sombre mood, dialogue exactingly stark. L esbians have a love-hate relationship with cinema, a place in which, Andrea Weiss wrote in her 1992 work Vampires and Violets, only one image of the lesbian may surface at any one time.
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