Film Review: On Chesil Beach

Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan give beautiful performances in this nuanced portrait of a young couple whose love and confidence are rocked by repressive societal expectations.

Helmed by theatre director Dominic Cooke, this screen version of Ian McEwan’s 2007 novel has thematic parallels with the most famous McEwan adaptation, Atonement. Set in 1962, Ronan and Howle star as Florence and Edward, a young educated couple who fall head over heels for each other despite their different backgrounds. Florence’s family is distinguished and posturing, while Edward is, in the words of Florence’s mother, a “country bumpkin”.

But Edward is also romantic and kind, caring for his mentally unwell artist mother (a remarkable Anne-Marie Duff) – despite some occasional bouts of temper. Florence, for her part, is quietly headstrong yet tender, an ambitious musician whose love for Edward is clear in the joy that she radiates in his presence.

Until, that is, their honeymoon, when suddenly the intoxicating luminosity of their love is sucked out of the room. What’s left behind is a suffocating awkwardness, all centred on the night’s expected consummation – their first.

Cooke is a playful yet careful filmmaker, jumping back and forth in time to create an intimate jigsaw about this young couple. He also effortlessly blends much-needed humour into the film’s tensest moments, for example allowing a Fawlty Towers-style pair of waiters to barge into a quiet dinner.

Ronan’s performance is beautiful and layered, capturing both her character’s endearing naivete, and later, the rigid anxiety enforced upon women around sex. Her unconventional but thought-provoking idea of love is sensitively portrayed, and the losses experienced are wrenching. Set before the sexual revolution of the ’60s, this drama about how repression and lack of communication play out in relationships is beautifully observed and strikingly prescient.

4/5