Director
Dominic Cooke

Stars
Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle and Emily Watson

Nearly 24 hours after seeing On Chesil Beach I’m still feeling moved by the experience. From the outside, this film doesn’t sound like much; the IMDB synopsis reads something like ‘A couple struggle to reconcile their young romance with issues of sexual freedom and societal pressure on an awkward and fateful wedding night’. When I read that I thought ‘eh, well at least it has Saoirse Ronan in it’….which (side note) she was utterly brilliant so I was right to trust my instincts there…but the film was so much more than that.

Based on the Ian McEwan (ATONEMENT) best-selling novel, On Chesil Beach details the relationship of Florence (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward (Billy Howle); two early twenty-something, sweethearts that have just married. Through the use of flashback scenes, first time feature film director, Dominic Cooke reveals each character individually by layers. Due to this method, the beginning of the film does feel a little bit clunky and for a while I was thinking it would work much better as a play, it takes some time for us to understand exactly what’s going on, but as the film starts to find its rhythm and we unravel the intricacies of our protagonists, each layer becomes a treat to behold.

Florence as it turns out, is a classically trained musician from a middle-upper class family, Edward on the other hand, is as Florence’s mother (played to perfection by Emily Watson) puts it ‘a country bumpkin’ with a challenging, lower-middle class family life. Howle adds a perfect amount of nervous, if not suppressed, charm to Edward, to counter Florence’s reserved, proper nature. Through the flashbacks of their courtship, home life and snippets of childhood we come to learn what drives and influences them as individuals, with thought provoking and at times heartbreaking revelations. The brilliance of this film is that the scenes that tell us the most are the ones where we’re told nothing. There is a subtlety to Cooke’s storytelling that makes you feel without entirely destroying you.

On Chesil Beach is a story that explores emotional repression in an era where people didn’t share their every thought, experience or opinion on social media. It was long before #metoo or even Oprah making us all talk about and examine our feelings. It was the time of stiff upper lips and defined roles and class expectations. The naivety of our characters with matters of sex, relationships and communication is fascinating and at times gut wrenching. There is a scene where Florence is reading a sex manual and is disgusted to learn what happens to the male anatomy during foreplay, and I can’t help but think of my Grandmother, who whilst sitting in a birthing suite waiting to give birth to my father in 1957, had to ask a nurse where the baby was coming out from. With the amount of education and resources available to us now it’s hard to fathom a time where men and women were so in the dark when it came to matters of their own body and sexuality, but Ian McEwan’s story brings these forgotten issues to light in the most poignant of ways.

This isn’t going to be a movie for everyone’s taste, but I urge you to give it a chance so that you too may have the opportunity to be moved by this little gem of a film.

4 stars

Trailer
ON CHESIL BEACH

Moviedoc thanks Miranda Brown Publicity for the invite to the screening of this film.

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