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On Chesil Beach
****
Dir: Dominic Cooke
Starring: Saiorse Ronan, Billy Howle, Emily Watson
(UK, 15, 1hr 50 mins )
Ian McEwan’s superb novella about marriage, sex and inhibition is brought to life with detailed, tender care by theatre director Cooke. Despite being hamstrung by flashbacks, it still packs a poignant punch.
Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle play Florence and Edward, young university graduates who meet and fall in love at a CND meeting in not very swinging 1962. The world is yet to change and the pair head to their wedding bed in a rundown seaside hotel in Dorset, both virgins. An unremarkable thing in the era before free love.
They are both clever and articulate Ronan comes from money, with Emily Watson her Oxford don mother and Samuel West her wealthy father. Howle comes from humbler stock, the son of gentle dad Adrian Scarborough and mentally-disturbed artist mother Anne Marie-Duff.
Howle has a lot of rage, like Ronan’s father. The flashbacks reveal more about their past as their night of wedded bliss unravels with excruciating tragedy. The pressure of sex and what it represents is huge, the mysteries of lovemaking and the taboos put up around it by previous generations well captured. Ronan and Howle make an engaging, tragic couple, understandable in all their foibles. Anne Marie-Duff shines as Howle’s mother, injured in a shockingly horrific train accident as does Scarborough as the loyal, caring husband struggling on.
Inherent in such tales is the often-clunky use of flashback but it mostly works here, although there is a flashback within a flashback at one point, stretching the structure somewhat. A sensitive retelling of McEwan’s equally sensitive story, this again shows how good Saoirse Ronan is and how dreadful it must have been living in a frustrated society where emotion was suppressed and lives wasted.
words Keiron Self
Out now in cinemas