On Chesil Beach review: a painstaking observation of hapless lovers

Dir Dominic Cooke, 110 mins (15), starring: Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle, Emily Watson, Anne-Marie Duff, Samuel West, Adrian Scarborough, Bebe Cave

The film is deliberately ambiguous about the behaviour and motivations of its two principal characters

“And now the foreplay is concluded. He enters her. This is known as penetration.” Florence Ponting (Saoirse Ronan) reads these lines in a sex education book with curiosity and mounting distaste midway through On Chesil Beach (based on Ian McEwan’s Booker Prize-nominated novella).

Stripped to its essentials, the film might best be described as a drama about the mating rituals of repressed young middle-class English couples in the early 1960s. It’s a nuanced and very well observed study of bad sex in which tiny accidents and misunderstandings threaten to scupper a marriage almost before it has started.

As the film begins, Florence and Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle) are in a seaside hotel at the start of their honeymoon. Although neither wants to admit as much, they are preparing to sleep together for the first time.

It’s 1962. Britain is a nation very ill at ease. The smallest details here reveal class tensions, the antagonism between generations and the gulf between men and women. Florence is the daughter of prominent businessman Geoffrey Ponting (Samuel West). Edward is the son of a humble senior school teacher from near Henley. They’re Oxbridge graduates who met by chance at a CND meeting and who have fallen in love. In flashbacks from the wedding night, we are given details of their backgrounds and courtship.

Director Dominic Cooke (best known for his work at the National Theatre and the Royal Court) has an eye for seemingly trifling moments which reveal the couple’s mounting anxieties. A zip on a dress will stick at a crucial moment. Edward will go to bed with his wife while still wearing his heavy brogues. (For some reason, the film is full of shots of the protagonists’ feet.) The bedside dialogue emphasises the comic awkwardness of the situation. “Am I squashing you?” “Not really.” “Just lie still.” These are some of the lines the lovers exchange.

Florence is a brilliant classical musician whose dream is to play at the Wigmore Hall with her own Mozart quartet. He’s a historian with a passion for rock’n’roll. The couple’s use of language is as revealing as their actions and musical tastes. Florence describes Chuck Berry as “merry and bouncy”. She seems stuck in a 1950s time warp. Ronan plays her beautifully, capturing her intelligence, independence and ambition – but also her extreme uncertainty, especially when it comes to physical matters. We’re not sure what holds her back – whether it’s disgust, prudishness or snobbery, or a mixture of all three. She has piercing blue eyes and a voice that reminds you of Phyllis Calvert in old Ealing or Gainsborough Studios movies. Her character here is very different from the rebellious and ambitious young Californian she played in Lady Bird but shares some of the same single-mindedness. She may seem diffident when it comes to sex but she is very confident about her abilities as a violinist.

This is a love story in which few sparks fly. Edward is referred to disapprovingly as a “beatnik”. He’s a coarser, more impulsive figure with a capacity for violence and a love of nature. He could be the Ted Hughes to her Sylvia Plath if only there was more passion between the young husband and wife.

Both families have secrets. We see Florence as a child on a sailing boat with her ultra-competitive and snobbish father. He is antisemitic and cheats at tennis. There are oblique hints that he may have behaved improperly towards her but it’s impossible to tell if he was abusive and how this may have affected her attitudes towards men.

Edward’s mother (Anne-Marie Duff) is (or was) a brilliant art historian. She suffered brain damage after a freak accident on a railway platform and likes to wander around naked in the garden, communing with nature. Her family carry on in a very British way as if nothing has happened, always trying to humour her and to treat her as a dotty aunt while waiting for her rare moments of lucidity.

The hotel is in a beautiful location but is shabby genteel with a hint of Fawlty Towers about it. There is a wonderful scene early on in which the young couple are forced to eat a meal in their hotel room attended by two smirking “silver service” waiters. These waiters, who’ve already watered down the wine, won’t leave until they receive their tip. They listen in as the newlyweds make small talk and make suggestive remarks about what lies ahead.

At the same time that they expose the hypocrisies and insecurities of the English middle classes, the filmmakers lovingly celebrate pastoral English landscapes and traditions. We see geese flying over the water. Florence and Edward are shown walking across misty meadows or through spectacular forests. We see idyllic shots of cricket being played on village greens, of cyclists on country lanes, and of small town railway stations. Chesil Beach itself, with its long stretches of pebbles, low skyline and abandoned boat, looks spectacular.

The film is deliberately ambiguous about the behaviour and motivations of its two principal characters. Its main action takes place over only a few hours on the evening of the first day of their marriage. Late in the film, we are then whisked forward in time, first to 1975 and then to 2007. What we learn in these later scenes places the characters’ actions back in 1962 in a different light. Our assumptions turn out to be misplaced. (The flash forwards are not helped by the artificial make-up which is used to show the characters ageing.) When they married, Florence and Edward were very “straight, innocent and young”. The fascination of the film lies in its painstaking observation of the hapless lovers and of the world around them. Left to their own devices, they might have behaved very differently. They had to deal not only with their own expectations but with those of everyone else around them in a class-obsessed and censorious society during a period when, it seems, the British were (as Florence puts it) just “hopeless at sex”.