Review: On Chesil Beach
The year is 1962, the setting a Georgian hotel beside Dorset's Chesil Beach. Post-war repression has yet to fully bloom into the sexual revolution. Edward (Billy Howle) and Florence (Saoirse Ronan) are on their honeymoon, their life as a married couple but a few hours old.
Edward is eager for the wedding night, Florence more reserved, perhaps even reluctant. In Ian McEwan's heartbreaker of a novella, On Chesil Beach, the lead-up to the consummation becomes a demented sort of foreplay to an act that results in an irreparable, regrettable rift between two people who are clearly in love but who do not have neither the language nor the emotional capability to have a genuine conversation about sex.
The film adaptation, directed by Dominic Cooke and adapted by McEwan himself, both adheres to and expands upon the confines of McEwan's chamber piece. At first it seems a comedy of errors. Not only are the couple interrupted by various figures - the duo of waiters who must wait until beef service before they leave Edward and Florence in their room, Florence herself as she distracts Edward with queries and small talk - but also by the flashbacks in the narrative, which provide background to their romance and their respective lives.
Edward is a country boy, smart, hard-working, prone to flashes of anger, burdened with a brain-damaged mother (Anne-Marie Duff), and welcoming of the rock 'n roll music that's beginning to infiltrate the airwaves. Florence, on the other hand, is a violinist of a string quartet, ambitious, disciplined, well-to-do, and perhaps sexually abused by her father (Samuel West). Though they are from different backgrounds, Edward and Florence connect instantly and deeply, and scenes of their courtship are perfectly pitched and are contrasted with the dread of their present situation.
The constant transitioning between present and past is a deliberately frustrating device, mimicking Edward's mounting impatience, but ultimately a detrimental one. This is a film that would have benefited from either a linear timeline or, as with Memento or Irreversible, starting at the end and finishing at the beginning. As it stands, the film never gets a proper rhythm going and the tale's most pivotal moment, when it finally, blessedly arrives, loses a great deal of its power. Any adaptation of this particular work was always going to be a tricky prospect - his emotionally meticulous and ruthlessly unflinching dissections are perfect for the page, but less so on the screen where filmmakers are inclined to soften his sharp edges. That he should do the same himself and turn what was an emotionally expansive work into something stale and fusty is a disappointment.
At least the film is handsome to look at, with Sean Bobbitt's cinematography arguably offering more insight into the character's internal turmoil than the script itself. Ronan and Howle both deliver beautifully calibrated portrayals of panic, misunderstanding, and deep but easily unmoored affection.
On Chesil Beach
Directed by: Dominic Cooke
Written by: Ian McEwan; adapted from his own novel
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle, Emily Watson, Anne-Marie Duff, Samuel West, Adrian Scarborough, Bebe Cave
