For about an hour, “On Chesil Beach” seems like the most genteel sex comedy ever made. A movie that hems and haws and tries to avoid getting to the wedding-night bed, it starts out an a charming, intimate story of a young couple from the early 1960s whose naïveté and inexperience leads to a string of minor calamities as they approach the moment when two nervous kids will lose their virginity.
And then, in a sharp, shocking moment, “On Chesil Beach” becomes something darker, tougher and more tragic, and yanks it well out of the sex-comedy arena into an uncertain new place.
It’s not always a smooth landing, but director Dominic Cooke, novelist/screenwriter Ian McEwan and stars Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle make it a touching, bittersweet one.
Adapted from his own work by acclaimed British novelist McEwan (who was also represented at last year’s Toronto Film Festival with “The Children Act”), the film stars Ronan as a young violinist from Oxford and Howle as a more rough-hewn history student from London. It takes place in the moment in the ’60s before they became The Sixties, the same period of repression mixed with tantalizing promise that was the setting for “An Education” eight years ago.
For Florence and Edward (Ronan and Howle), the moments of promise are represented in small touches like a Chuck Berry song on the radio as they sit nervously in their honeymoon hotel room at the English seaside. They kiss, they stall, they fumble with zippers and then stall some more — and the movie is complicit in their delaying tactics, slipping into one flashback after another as if it also is none too anxious to get to the big moment.
As always, Ronan is completely winning, and Howle makes a good contrast — he’s a little more wordy, perhaps, but we know it’s mostly bluster.
When the moment of truth arrives for the young couple, though, the gentle laughs end. Florence bolts out of the honeymoon bed, we get flashes of a buried secret, and nothing is the same. It’s not for the couple and it’s not for the audience, as “On Chesil Beach” stops being a chronicle of ways to delay sex and turns into a chronicle of how not to recover from a bad moment.
The last third of the film, said McEwan in a post-screening Q&A in Toronto last September, differs dramatically from his original novel, using flash-forwards and tender glances to covey things that were depicted internally in the book.
First, the film jumps ahead to 1975 to a lovely record-store encounter that only involves one of the main characters. And then it jumps again to 2007 for an ending that manages to be affecting even if it’s been telegraphed for at least an hour, and hurt by old-age makeup that’s far more effective on Ronan than on Howle.
Director Cooke, to his credit, has a soft touch with McEwan, whose incisive work should have produced more top-notch movies by now. (“Atonement” was the best known, “The Comfort of Strangers” the darkest.) This is a story that begins in nervous bliss and ends in deep regret, and he makes it an uneven but moving journey.
12 Hottest TIFF Movies for Sale, From 'Hostiles' to Tonya Harding Drama (Photos)
Though it's not as robust as the annual Sundance Film Festival market or populous as Cannes' Marche du Film, TIFF is a pedigreed springboard for solid indies. Here are this year's hottest films for sale.
"I, Tonya" [UTA / CAA / Miramax] Arguably the hottest title for sale at TIFF 2017, producer-star dynamo Margot Robbie offers up a drama about U.S. Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding and her notorious involvement in the beating of teammate Nancy Kerrigan before the 1994 Olympics. Buyers are dying to see this one.
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"The Children Act" [CAA / FilmNation] Richard Eyre’s drama has an attractive cast in the firebrand Emma Thompson (who wouldn’t buy this movie simply for the joy of watching her promote it?) and Stanley Tucci, reunited after the recent box office smash “Beauty and the Beast.” The film is an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s same-named novel, about a British judge asked to intervene when a minor refuses a blood transfusion over his religious beliefs.
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"The Cured" [WME] High-brow horror is hard to do, but a category critics and select audiences adore for delivering chills without the tackier conventions of the genre. “The Cured” would certainly check that box, thanks to a clever and unsettling premise: A portion of the population became zombies but were cured. They suffer extreme judgment in a recovering society for, well, eating other people.
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"Hostiles" [CAA / WME] Christian Bale reunites with his "Out of the Furnace" director Scott Cooper for this gritty Western -- already putting Bale in the Oscar conversation after an earlier festival debut. Rosamund Pike, Ben Foster and Jesse Plemmons co-star.
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"Submergence" [UTA] Perhaps the dreamiest trio at TIFF, auteur Wim Wenders will offer up a romance between Alicia Vikander and James McAvoy. The former plays a deep-sea researcher, the latter a water engineer, attempting to connect across continents and oceans while a civil war rages.
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"Mom and Dad" [CAA / XYZ] Giving a fabulous middle finger to helicopter parents, Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair star in writer-director Brian Taylor's super-dark comedy about a 24-hour hysteria that sees parents attempt violence against their own children.
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"Papillon" [CAA] Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek star in a remake of the 1973 thriller that starred Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman -- where two men plot an escape from a prison island.
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"Three Christs" [CAA / Highland Film Group] Jon Avnet sets about the ambitious task of creating both a black comedy and a film that gets mental illness right. Richard Gere stars as a doctor treating three paranoid schizophrenics (Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins, Bradley Whitford) who all believe they are Jesus Christ.
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"My Days of Mercy" [UTA / WME] This politically charged gay love story pits Kate Mara and Ellen Page against each other on two sides of a capital punishment debate. It also brings them together romantically. Trivia: The official TIFF festival guide labels Page a "powerhouse Canadian," which just makes us smile.
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"Eating Animals" [CAA] Natalie Portman produces this well-received doc about the horrors of meat consumption based on a memoir by Jonathan Safran Foer.
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"Marrowbone" [CAA / Lionsgate] Screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez makes his directorial debut in a buzzy, supernatural thriller about four children orphaned by the loss of their mother. The lost brood take refuge in an abandoned house only to find sinister forces lurking there.
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"Woman Walks Ahead" [CAA] Jessica Chastain and Michael Greyeyes lead this substantive drama about New York artist Catherine Weldon, who became the trusted confidante of legendary Sioux chief Sitting Bull.
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Toronto film market has awards bait, high-brow horror and sweaty Charlie Hunnam
Though it's not as robust as the annual Sundance Film Festival market or populous as Cannes' Marche du Film, TIFF is a pedigreed springboard for solid indies. Here are this year's hottest films for sale.