There’s a struggle in how to talk about the sex scenes in Ammonite, in which Kate Winslet stars as early 19th century paleontologist Mary Anning and Saoirse Ronan plays a docile young wife named Charlotte, who connects with Mary intimately and sexually.
In any film in which there is a same-sex love scene, especially starring two A-list movie stars, there’s a struggle in how to talk about it. It’s a struggle for the performers themselves. It’s a struggle for critics and writers, especially those who identify as members of the queer community.
The sex scene in Ammonite is extremely consequential, revelatory in terms of Mary and Charlotte’s need to evolve and be satisfied as women, and groundbreaking in terms of its physicality and eroticism. It’s a frank look at two people giving into desire with a realism and lack of judgment that still rarely occurs in same-sex romances on film.
So with Ammonite, just as with the handful of other queer films featuring similarly eye-opening love scenes, there is almost an imperative to discuss and celebrate the actual sex because these depictions are still so scarce. At the same time, talking about them at all runs the risk of the scenes being fetishized or exploited, dominating all conversation about a film that, like Ammonite, has many other points to make about intimacy and independence.
It’s all too easy for every headline to be about the sex, and for the movie to be reduced to the “lesbian sex movie.” How, then, do you talk about it?
Winslet doesn’t have an answer. But she’s passionate about asking the question.
“It’s such a difficult question. So often when I read about other LGBTQ films, I will get so irritated when they say ‘the controversial sex scene,’ or ‘the much-talked-about sex scene,’ or ‘the highly anticipated intimate love story between two women or two men,’” she tells The Daily Beast.
“It drives me fucking crazy because we don’t do that with heterosexual love stories at all,” she continues, her speech gathering speed as she gets more fired up about it. “Like, at all. We don’t do that. So, in a way, are we all then culpable? Are we all then somehow culpable that we have allowed these heterosexual stereotypes to just lead the way? I guess maybe we are. I don’t know! I’m still even asking those questions.”
Ronan is similarly torn.
“There’s so much to be talked about with the film and the relationship between these two people. And that’s a part of it, but it’s not everything,” she tells the Beast. “But I do also get that the conversation needs to be had quite a bit more before we can go, 'Alright, two women having sex, like we’ve, we’ve seen it.’ It’s not completely normalized yet, but hopefully we’re getting there.”
Mary Anning was a pioneering British fossil excavator who lived in the first half of the 1800s. “A fucking rock star,” as Winslet describes her, she overcame a Dickensian list of circumstances, not to mention gender barriers, on her way to a slew of scientific accomplishments, driven by her work and an astounding lack of resentment—even if her discoveries were often stolen from under her by rich, less clever men.
Aside from its setting in the historic seaside resort of Lyme Regis, and the assertion of Mary’s brilliance, Ammonite is more interpretation than biography, which is how Charlotte Murchison, Ronan’s character, enters the picture.
Mary’s work is largely unknown except to the most interested of scientists, which includes Charlotte’s husband, Roderick (James McArdle), who makes a point to stop in Lyme Regis while on a tour of Southwest England so he could talk with Mary about her work.
After suffering a miscarriage, Charlotte becomes sullen and withdrawn. Roderick thinks the seaside could be good for her constitution and offers to pay Mary to board Charlotte and enlist her as an apprentice. After a rocky start, they each end up infatuated with the values that the other—grace, fortitude—respectively doesn’t have.
Ronan has had a remarkable run in recent years playing characters who have awakenings about coming of age, their womanhood, and their agency: Brooklyn’s Eilis Lacey, Lady Bird’s title character, and Little Women’s Jo March. To that end, Charlotte was a departure for the actress.
“It was very new territory for me to be playing the girl in the film that wears the corset and the pretty dress and cross stitches and things like that,” she says. “Jo March certainly isn’t cross-stitching.”
She found herself having to extract physicality she wanted to seed into the character, but which only starts to blossom once Mary and Charlotte experience their first intense sexual encounter. Whether or not that encounter actually happened is another story.
There is no evidence that Mary had a same-sex relationship—or any relationship, for that matter. There’s something revolutionary on its own that Ammonite writer-director Francis Lee decided not to make her heterosexual by default, as is society’s instinct.
There were letters that were exchanged between Mary and several women in her life to which she had strong alliances that inspired this interpretation, Winslet says, “of how beautiful her life could possibly have been.”
She and Lee pored over letters they discovered between women that were written around the turn of the 19th century. “These friendships were utterly beautiful, you know... breathtaking,” she says. “It made me sort of wish I had such intense correspondences with some of my friends.”
Seeing how loving, meaningful, and, more, consistent these letters were informed the freedom that’s reflected in the almost cumbersome passion of Mary and Charlotte’s love scenes.
“It isn’t shrouded in secrecy or fear,” Winslet says. “It’s a story that somehow normalizes same-sex love without hesitation. The air of secrecy around a same-sex relationship isn’t a part of the narrative.”
Ammonite is Francis Lee’s second feature, following 2017’s God’s Own Country. Similarly about forbidden love, it tracked the combustible emotional and erotic connection between two sheep farmers in Yorkshire, men drawn to each other with a carnal ferocity but whose willingness to give in is complicated by societal norms.
“It’s sort of shocking in its rawness,” Ronan says. Like Winslet, she was immediately struck by the film’s approach to sex and romance the first time she saw it. “There’s these, like, really kind of animalistic moments between these two people, but also so much tenderness as well.”
It’s full of passion, longing, and regret, but also graphic, visceral gay sex. The scenes are gritty and hormonal, again, realistic in ways rarely seen but also an integral part of a heartbreaking, beautiful tapestry of two men’s love. Still, because of how infrequent a film with scenes so strikingly vulnerable and real are, the movie is sometimes still reduced to “the one with the hot gay sex in the mud.”
“I’m very much a person who believes that we need more lesbian, gay, LGBTQ—all of that—we need more films like these so that we don’t just compare the one film like that to the other one film like that,” Winslet says. “It’s so crazy that we don’t compare a heterosexual thriller to another heterosexual movie about corruption—we don’t compare heterosexual movies—but we seem to compare LGBTQ ones in a way that I often feel is a little off-balance.”
If Lee’s God’s Own Country and Ammonite are grouped together, it’s because of the ways in which they combat those standards, especially when it comes to how we talk about queer sex in films.
The truth is that the sex scenes in Ammonite were a preoccupation even before it had its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. In a few buzz-generating interviews, Winslet spoke about how she choreographed the love scenes herself, collaborating with Ronan on their comfort levels and what they, the performers, felt was believable to the characters and their desires in the moment, absent of a straight male gaze.
So while everyone went into Ammonite already talking about a sex scene they had yet to see, the conversation did seem different. While there were certainly tinges of leering to the discourse, the talk was also about agency and how Winslet’s seizing control might affect how and what we see.
“I think we’ve heard so many horror stories from a lot of actresses who have had sex scenes or gay sex scenes in movies in the past that they’ve been a part of,” Ronan says. (She doesn’t mention it specifically, but Blue Is the Warmest Color could be served up as an example.)
“It was really helpful for the three of us to bring our different perspectives to that conversation,” she continues. “Me as the sort of younger woman, Kate as someone who has been working on film sets for a long time and has probably done a lot more sex scenes than I have, and then Francis, who has made something like God’s Own Country and has done something really beautiful with the sex scenes that he’s directed.”
The scene is achingly erotic, the film’s score cutting out so you just hear the actors’ breathing and the creaking of the bed. There are sex acts that are still almost never seen on film, because they are almost never put on film. But it’s endearing, too: two people figuring out their bodies, fumbling as they work out what they want, what feels good, how to please the other. It’s not stylized or filtered through a male gaze. It’s purely love and sex.
It’s a point that Winslet often brings up when talking about the film, and does so in our interview: the sexual orientation of the characters is never referenced in the movie, and maybe never is even considered by the women themselves. Yet it’s at the center of our collective preoccupations before, during, and after watching it.
“The actual intimacy, the sex, between these two women, for me, it’s one of the most important parts of the film,” Winslet says. “And yet it’s almost more of a big deal for Mary Anning to get on a boat and leave Lyme Regis to go to London by herself than it was for her to be intimate with Charlotte Murchison. This is a very difficult one because by talking about the actual sex scenes, one doesn’t want to draw attention to just those scenes and take away from other elements of the story.”
It’s that struggle mentioned before. How do you pay the sex the heed it deserves without feeding a reductive obsession? How do you talk about sex scenes in a film like Ammonite?
The answer she arrives at is to keep asking the question until there is actually a response. At least that way people are talking about it and considering it. You may not say the right thing. You might say a brilliant thing. But nothing changes if you don’t say anything.
“You know, people are quite quick to judge,” she says. “And I don’t want to live my life anymore not being honest or saying what I think or how I feel because I’m worrying about judgment or criticism. So often now I feel that as a kind of universe, we’re very quick to look at people and say, ‘Well hang on. You can’t say that now because you did so-and-so 10 years ago or you said this 10 years ago.’ You know what I mean? It’s like saying to someone in Hollywood you can’t be vegan because you’ve been eating hamburgers for the last 15 years.”
It’s clear that Winslet likes theorizing about these things and, from the place in her career now, interrogating herself and her own journey there. The more she talks about Ammonite, she says, the more she realizes the things she never talked about in the past, the times she never spoke up, and how “it continues to dawn on me and make me feel a little mad at myself.”
The longer she stays on the topic, the faster she speaks and the more out of breath she gets. She finally exhales. “I just hope that by speaking from a place that isn’t fearful, myself, of judgment that I am able to contribute to the conversation.”
