A couple's lives change forever on their wedding day in this Ian McEwan (Atonement) adaptation starring Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird) and Billy Howle (Dunkirk).
Now on their honeymoon, Florence (Ronan) and Edward (Howle) learn about the differences between them – their attitudes, temperaments and their drastically different backgrounds. Out on the beach on their fateful wedding day, one of them makes a major decision that will utterly change both of their lives forever.
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Tagged as a romance, but very much of the tears-before-bedtime variety, Dominic Cooke’s eager adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 2007 novella is surprising for the fact that it exists at all. Although the book, which charts the wedding night traumas of a naive young couple in pre-Swinging Sixties England, has plenty of the qualities that usually make for compelling drama, it pivots on a scene of sexual frankness rarely seen in respectable cinema.
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It’s a lyrical and rapturous film — a repressed passion play, funny, delicate and heartbreaking.
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The text is rich with stylistic flourishes and social observations, and boasts a genuinely wrenching closing sequence. The film, alas, is not.
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It is a tender and valuable film, well acted, with a shrewd eye for how naive you can be in your early 20s, how impatient, how pompous, how tragicomically un-self-aware.
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Even with author Ian McEwan adapting his own novel for the screen, this somewhat stilted picture struggles to convey the deft emotional complexity of the source material.
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Offers up so many tricky tonal changes, enough that Cooke eventually gives them over to a single note: limp.
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This film of delicate emotional nuance recounts an enchanting but sad love story.
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Crackerjack script, and performances from the two leads which amount to a master class in great acting.
Full reviewOn Chesil Beach is available to stream in Australia now on Google Play and Apple TV and SBS On Demand and Prime Video Store.
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