Chesil Beach is a long shingle bank joining the Isle of Portland to the Dorset mainland and enclosing a shallow lagoon on its landward side. In July 1962, Edward and Florence Mayhew, a young newly married couple, spend their honeymoon in a hotel overlooking Chesil Beach. (Ian McEwan, the author both of the screenplay for this film and of the novel on which it is based, may have chosen this for the setting of this story because it is not too far from Woolbridge Manor House, the setting for the most famously disastrous wedding night in English literature, that of Tess and Angel Clare in Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles").
The film's depiction of Edward and Florence's wedding night is intercut with the story of their upbringing and of their courtship. They are from very different backgrounds. Florence is the daughter of a successful businessman and an Oxford philosophy don. Musically gifted, she plays as a violinist in a string quartet. Edward is the son of the headmaster of a primary school in a small Chiltern village. His upbringing has been a chaotic one ever since his mother was brain-damaged in an accident, as his father has struggled to cope with the challenge of combining his work with bringing up his children. He has recently graduated with a degree in history from London University and has accepted a position with Florence's father's company, while toying with the idea of becoming a professional historian.
The book's opening sentence reads:-
"They were young, educated, and both virgins on this their wedding night and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible",
and this sums up the problem facing Edward and Florence. Much more importance than the difference in their social background is the difference in their attitudes to love and sex. To put it bluntly, Edward is eagerly anticipating their first sexual encounter, Florence is dreading it. This does not mean that she does not love Edward, or even that she only loves him in the way that she might love a close friend. At an emotional level she loves him very deeply; he is the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with. She does not, however, want to have sex with him. Neither, for that matter, does she want to have sex with anyone else. In her mind love and sex (the very idea of which she finds unpleasant, even disgusting) are two quite different, unconnected things. For Edward, however, his love for Florence and his sexual desire for her are two sides of the same coin. The question at the heart of the book is whether their love will be strong enough to cope with this conflict of attitudes.
It is true that sexual behaviour was to some extent changed later in the decade by the widespread availability of the contraceptive pill, but the problem which confronts Edward and Florence is not one of access to contraception. Nor is it one of access to sexual education. Florence is not ignorant of the facts of life- in fact she has been desperately trying to prepare for married life by reading an earlier precursor of "The Joy of Sex". She knows the facts of life but does not like them, and her dilemma is not eased by the fact that some of her contemporaries have a very different view.
"On Chesil Beach" is made in the British "heritage cinema" style with plenty of lavish attention to period detail; this style, traditionally used for the Victorian or Edwardian periods is now being extended to cover stories set in the forties, fifties and sixties. (An Education is another good example). There are fine performances from the two leading actors, Billy Howle (an actor I had not previously come across) and Saoirse Ronan (who previously starred in another McEwan adaptation, "Atonement"). Howle's Edward is a young man full of the eagerness and idealism of youth, and Ronan's Florence is so tender and appealing that one can easily see why any young man would fall for her.
I didn't enjoy the film as much as I did Ian McEwan's original novel (or novella) even though McEwan himself wrote the screenplay. Part of this is perhaps because the structure of the story is a complicated one, starting with Florence and Edward's wedding night and telling their back-story in a series of flashbacks, is a complicated one, and possibly needed a more experienced director than debutant Dominic Cooke to prevent it from seeming disjointed. Another major reason, however, must be Mc Ewan's odd decision to change his own ending. I felt, in fact, that the final "flash-forwards" to 1975 and 2007 could easily have been dispensed with in the transition from printed page to screen, but if the film-makers wanted to keep them they should also have stuck to the original story.
In the novella as originally written, Florence remains single after her split from Edward because she is still in love with him. In the film she marries Charles, another member of her string quartet and, moreover, it is implied that she does so very soon after her break with Edward. (Chloe, her daughter by Charles, appears to be around 12 in a scene set in 1975). The film-makers do not appear to realise that this change in the plot raises a whole host of further questions. (Was Florence in love, or half in love, with Charles at the time of her marriage to Edward? Was her failure to consummate her marriage really due to her unresolved feelings for another man?) These questions, of course, make a huge difference to the way in which we view everything which has gone before, but the film never attempts to answer them, or even acknowledges that they exist. 7/10
The film's depiction of Edward and Florence's wedding night is intercut with the story of their upbringing and of their courtship. They are from very different backgrounds. Florence is the daughter of a successful businessman and an Oxford philosophy don. Musically gifted, she plays as a violinist in a string quartet. Edward is the son of the headmaster of a primary school in a small Chiltern village. His upbringing has been a chaotic one ever since his mother was brain-damaged in an accident, as his father has struggled to cope with the challenge of combining his work with bringing up his children. He has recently graduated with a degree in history from London University and has accepted a position with Florence's father's company, while toying with the idea of becoming a professional historian.
The book's opening sentence reads:-
"They were young, educated, and both virgins on this their wedding night and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible",
and this sums up the problem facing Edward and Florence. Much more importance than the difference in their social background is the difference in their attitudes to love and sex. To put it bluntly, Edward is eagerly anticipating their first sexual encounter, Florence is dreading it. This does not mean that she does not love Edward, or even that she only loves him in the way that she might love a close friend. At an emotional level she loves him very deeply; he is the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with. She does not, however, want to have sex with him. Neither, for that matter, does she want to have sex with anyone else. In her mind love and sex (the very idea of which she finds unpleasant, even disgusting) are two quite different, unconnected things. For Edward, however, his love for Florence and his sexual desire for her are two sides of the same coin. The question at the heart of the book is whether their love will be strong enough to cope with this conflict of attitudes.
It is true that sexual behaviour was to some extent changed later in the decade by the widespread availability of the contraceptive pill, but the problem which confronts Edward and Florence is not one of access to contraception. Nor is it one of access to sexual education. Florence is not ignorant of the facts of life- in fact she has been desperately trying to prepare for married life by reading an earlier precursor of "The Joy of Sex". She knows the facts of life but does not like them, and her dilemma is not eased by the fact that some of her contemporaries have a very different view.
"On Chesil Beach" is made in the British "heritage cinema" style with plenty of lavish attention to period detail; this style, traditionally used for the Victorian or Edwardian periods is now being extended to cover stories set in the forties, fifties and sixties. (An Education is another good example). There are fine performances from the two leading actors, Billy Howle (an actor I had not previously come across) and Saoirse Ronan (who previously starred in another McEwan adaptation, "Atonement"). Howle's Edward is a young man full of the eagerness and idealism of youth, and Ronan's Florence is so tender and appealing that one can easily see why any young man would fall for her.
I didn't enjoy the film as much as I did Ian McEwan's original novel (or novella) even though McEwan himself wrote the screenplay. Part of this is perhaps because the structure of the story is a complicated one, starting with Florence and Edward's wedding night and telling their back-story in a series of flashbacks, is a complicated one, and possibly needed a more experienced director than debutant Dominic Cooke to prevent it from seeming disjointed. Another major reason, however, must be Mc Ewan's odd decision to change his own ending. I felt, in fact, that the final "flash-forwards" to 1975 and 2007 could easily have been dispensed with in the transition from printed page to screen, but if the film-makers wanted to keep them they should also have stuck to the original story.
In the novella as originally written, Florence remains single after her split from Edward because she is still in love with him. In the film she marries Charles, another member of her string quartet and, moreover, it is implied that she does so very soon after her break with Edward. (Chloe, her daughter by Charles, appears to be around 12 in a scene set in 1975). The film-makers do not appear to realise that this change in the plot raises a whole host of further questions. (Was Florence in love, or half in love, with Charles at the time of her marriage to Edward? Was her failure to consummate her marriage really due to her unresolved feelings for another man?) These questions, of course, make a huge difference to the way in which we view everything which has gone before, but the film never attempts to answer them, or even acknowledges that they exist. 7/10