![]() With them being critical implements of Anning’s trade, the image of those well-worn instruments punctuates Ammonite’s investigation of class and the appropriation of women’s work by men - the opening sequence sees a man erasing Mary’s name from her earliest fossil as it's brought to the British Museum in London. “Certainly in Mary's case, her hands are her survival.” “Hands, to me in particular the backs of the person's hands, are one of the most beautiful things in the world, because they show the lives that we've lived, the loves that we've lost, the love that we've felt, the work that we've put into anything,” she adds. It was her way of doing the job that she needed to do.” “So I was really pleased that we saw a lot of that in the story, because her hands were very much her tools. “We would allocate extra time in the morning to get my hands looking like Mary's hands, or how we thought Mary's hands ought to be,” Winslet says. They’re weathered, raw, and often caked with mud. Writer and director Lee ( God’s Own Country) homes in on several close-ups of Winslet’s hands throughout the film. She says she “spent months copying hand from old diary pages, and excerpts that they have at Lyme Regis Museum” to perfect Anning’s hand for letters and for creating sketches of her fossils and of Mary’s eventual love Charlotte. The artistry of Anning’s work is exposed like fine sculptures in scenes with Mary digging into the curves of any given fossil with knowing fingers before lightly brushed away the fine grit.Īn Oscar and Emmy winner who kick-started her career playing queer in 1994’s Heavenly Creatures, Winslet not only learned to excavate fossils. But in keeping with the film’s exploration of the value of women’s work and an innate need for physical contact, Winslet’s/Mary’s hands became the tools most integral to the story. It was all very dramatic,” Winslet says.īy day, she roamed the beaches of England’s Lyme Regis with a fossil expert, learning to engage the tools of the trade, including a hammer and chisel. “There was a gigantic section of cliff, 200 meters down from the cottage where I was, that actually collapsed one day right onto the beach. To play the role of the real-life 19th-century paleontologist, by night Winslet lived alone in a cottage on a bluff where the waves crashed below her like something out of a gothic novel. “So much of their connection is made through looks and just falling into the same rhythm as one another, in spite of their class differences,” Winslet says of Charlotte, an upper-class married woman Mary initially begrudgingly tutors and nurses back to health before they inevitably fall in love. When Charlotte and Mary just touch hands, it's mind-numbingly electric, because the touch is so sparse for so much of the story.” “At a time now, when we crave connection and affection so much because we all have had to go without it in certain ways because of COVID, to watch a film like this. “This is a film that is about the power of connections, and the power of touch, however small that might be,’ Winslet tells The Advocate. Mary’s carriage shifts, and with just a slight inflection of her shoulder, Winslet telegraphs her character’s chronic longing for contact and the healing effects of touch. There’s a scene in Francis Lee’s Ammonite where Saoirse Ronan’s Charlotte, visiting the seaside to treat her melancholia and recovering from an illness at the home of Kate Winslet’s isolated and guarded Mary Anning, places a hand on Mary’s back.
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