On Chesil Beach

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.”

 

Nothing demonstrates what a cumbersome and ultimately fragile medium the motion picture is more than an adaptation of a good novel – in this case Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2017). It was the last of three projects to adapt the novel to film, starting in 2010 with Sam Mendes, who had bigger fish to fry (Skyfall), then it was passed on to Mike Newell, until the backers backed out. Finally, in 2016, Dominic Cooke, who is an experienced theater director, took it on as his first film.

McEwan wrote the script for the film, the first time since he adapted The Innocent in 1993. At just 166 pages (40,000 words), On Chesil Beach is a slight novel, so its fleshing out presented McEwan with an opportunity to revisit his material and even make some additions. A great deal more is made, for instance, of Edward’s mother (Anne-Marie Duff) in the film, and Florence’s therapeutic effect on her. And I liked how Florence gets Edward to admit, as he's moving his hand up her skirt, that he’s a virgin, too. Trouble is, it probably made her even more afraid of what was coming.

If anything, the horrible anti-climax that occupies the center of McEwan’s novel is all the more ghastly in the film. Watching two people, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting (Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan), who are hopelessly ill-prepared on their wedding night, doing – or attempting to do – what is expected of them should’ve seemed a much more crushing attack on English society of 1962, and a punishing reminder of its failure to prepare two impeccably educated 22-year-olds for the facts of life. McEwan supplied us with what was going on inside their heads, and it definitely helped to explain the somewhat predictable disaster that ensues (for her sake he had refrained from masturbating a few weeks prior, but then she takes his penis in her hand to guide it and - -!). But to watch it unfold without knowing how much she is repulsed by everything about it, which partly explains her hysterical revulsion at being covered in his ejaculate (well, only her thigh in the film – in the novel it reaches her chin), is both shocking and outrageous.

McEwan sets up the tragic moment beautifully. Edward:

For over a year, Edward had been mesmerised by the prospect that on the evening of a given date in July the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman.

Then Florence:

Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness. For much of the time, through all the months of merry wedding preparation, she managed to ignore this stain on her happiness, but whenever her thoughts turned towards a close embrace - she preferred no other term -her stomach tightened dryly, she was nauseous at the back of her throat. In a modern, forward-looking handbook that was supposed to be helpful to young brides, with its cheery tones and exclamation marks and numbered illustrations, she came across certain phrases or words that almost made her gag: mucous membrane, and the sinister and glistening glans. Other phrases offended her intelligence, particularly those concerning entrances: Not long before he enters her . . . or, now at last he enters her, and, happily, soon after he has entered her . . . Was she obliged on the night to transform herself for Edward into a kind of portal or drawing room through which he might process? Almost as frequent was a word that suggested to her nothing but pain, flesh parted before a knife: penetration.

In the novel, time shifts are handled deftly and carry the reader back and forth from the wedding night scene to Edward’s and Florence’s childhoods and courtship. In the film the transitions are, if anything, too resplendent: one comes away convinced these two brilliant people deserved so much more than what they got. 

Both McEwan and Dominic Cooke, who was a novice at film directing, complained about the loss of control. While McEwan, writing the screenplay, knew that film was collaborative, he missed “playing God” and controlling everything himself. Cooke, who came from the theater, disliked having to contend with the input of so many others – mostly producers, who were eager to suggest ways of simplifying what he wanted to be complex.

Finally, where the film spoils the novel, not to mention Edward and Florence’s wedding night, is in the sex itself, fleeting though it is. (And the trouble starts with Edward’s tongue-kisses, which – evidently – neither actor was up to.) While McEwan could present to us the physical details without fear of obscenity: “She found his testicles first and, not at all afraid now, she curled her fingers softly round this extraordinary bristling item she had seen in different forms on dogs and horses, but had never quite believed could fit comfortably on adult humans. Drawing her fingers across its underside, she arrived at the base of his penis, which she held with extreme care, for she had no idea how sensitive or robust it was. She trailed her fingers along its length, noting with interest its silky texture, right to the tip, which she lightly stroked; and then, amazed by her own boldness, she moved back down a little, to take his penis firmly, about halfway along, and pulled it downwards, a slight adjustment, until she felt it just touching her labia”, the only thing that Dominic Cooke or his two actors could give us is a pantomime, and some other whitish substance standing in for Edward’s spilled seed on Florence’s inner thigh. As written, the scene presented difficulties for a 21st century filmmaker because it all takes place in the cramped space between Edward and Florence’s genitals. But leaving the crucial moment to our imaginations, when everything else in the film is strenuously explicit, was, I think, a mistake. It even reinforces the enforced ignorance about sex that got McEwan’s honeymooners in such a mess. Maybe Michael Winterbottom might’ve been up for the challenge. Or maybe not. And you can’t blame the literalness of film. As Charles Thomas Samuels wrote ages ago, “Sex needs words in order to be creative.”

As for the rest of the film, which is a long denouement in the novel, it was fine all the way up to the concert scene at the end in which Florence receives an ovation in her cherished Wigmore Hall and looks directly at Edward, who sits there and weeps. Movie makeup has made considerable advances in a hundred years, but they didn’t prepare me for the aged masks of Florence and Edward in that final shot, which were embarrassingly bad. They wanted a more conclusive conclusion than McEwan’s (in the novel, they never see each other again after the scene at night on Chesil Beach), but I could’ve done without it. (I especially could've done without learning that Florence had married that fucking cellist!) I prefer to remember them as Edward does:

Occasionally, he would come to a forking of the paths deep in a beech wood and idly think that this was when she must have paused to consult her map that morning in August, and he would imagine her vividly, only a few feet and forty years away, intent on finding him.

McEwan was echoing Philip Larkin, and not just “Annus Mirabilis”. Dominic Cooke told an interviewer that, if there is a lesson to be learned from the story, it is to never look back.

 

Truly, though our element is time,

We are not suited to the long perspectives

Open at each instant of our lives.

They link us to our losses: worse,

They show us what we have as it once was,

Blindingly undiminished, just as though

By acting differently we could have kept it so.

 

(“Reference Back” by Philip Larkin)