Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle, Emily Watson, Samuel West, Anne-Marie Duff, Adrian Scarborough, Rasmus Hardiker, Bebe Cave, Jonjo O’Neill.
Time and sensitivity are not natural bed fellows, neither is truly mature enough to handle each other’s whims, demands or spoilt child like behaviour when the going gets tough; it takes a writer of delicate persuasion in which to capture the beauty in heartache and the sudden fall of a relationship which had been so clear before.
On Chesil Beach sits patiently within the novels of Ian McEwan, its own rare charm framed by the sense of the unfamiliar gaining the upper hand and set in a time when the question of women’s rights and their dreams and aspirations after World War Two were engaging the baby boomer generation in a more dynamic and fruitful way. To shift that perspective from the written word to the cinema screen requires a deft touch that in today’s world that covets the immediate and the abruptly direct, is almost impossible.
We live in a world where the resolution needs to be signposted long before the life on screen becomes clear, it is almost as if there is no sense of waiting, no patience and because of this, at times, a film suffers for the want of appeasing the audience to whom are in tune with the modern day trend of speed watching; not content it seems to be truly fall in love with a film or even a television series without having their attention pulled away or dreaming of other pursuits.
On Chesil Beach book ends the appeal of patience, a story of love but one with the confines of one masculine aspect of conformity and the other, more untethered but still respectful, feminine duty to her own body, more demanding perhaps but ultimately displaying a sense of freedom. It is also plays superbly with the idea of the driving force of pride, how destructive it is, even when you may be in the right, when your instinct suggests that what you believe is passionately correct, quite often to step back and to resolve a situation, to swallow that pride, is the best course of action.
A remarkable execution of misplaced pride by both Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle as the young newlyweds, and with Adrian Scarborough and Anne-Marie Duff giving additional heartfelt performances in their roles, Ian McEwan’s screenplay of his beautifully paced novel, is viewed as sincere, persistent and gratifying. A rare beauty rarely transfers across genres well, On Chesil Beach defies that rule superbly.
Ian D. Hall