In 2008, 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan received her first Oscar nomination for Atonement<\/i>, a British WWII melodrama based on an Ian McEwan novel about a fanciful girl named Briony Tallis who unwittingly unravels the lives of her sister Cecilia and Cecilia\u2019s lover, Robbie, after accusing him of a crime he did not commit. Ten years later, Ronan stars in On Chesil Beach,<\/i> based on McEwan\u2019s novella set on the cusp of the sexual revolution in 1962. She plays Florence Ponting, a meek violinist on her honeymoon paralyzed by her fear of having sex for the first time. McEwan was immediately captivated by Ronan\u2019s intuitive talent when she was cast for Atonement<\/i>: <\/span>\u201cEven then, she showed an extraordinary ability to take control of the material, to morph from a sparky Irish kid into an upper-class English girl, with cut-glass accent to match,\u201d he told<\/span><\/a> Newsweek. In Vanity Fair, the author said<\/span><\/a> he \u201c<\/span>can no longer remember these characters as I once envisioned them. Saoirse had already kidnapped Briony. And now I\u2019ll forever see her stalking the beach as Florence.\u201d Atonement<\/i> and On Chesil Beach<\/i> are the perfect McEwan companion pieces to witness Saoirse Ronan\u2019s seamless transition from child star to grown-up actress, and her roles have intriguing similarities, despite the characters living in different eras and their ages being a decade apart. <\/span><\/p>\n McEwan admires<\/span><\/a> Ronan\u2019s ability \u201c<\/span>to convey a particular form of inwardness, of an imagination running riot.\u201d That inwardness is one of the most captivating aspects of Ronan\u2019s performances; behind her ice-blue eyes, you can sense all the thoughts, anxieties, hopes, dreams, and questions unspooling in her characters\u2019 minds. McEwan also says Ronan has the gift of \u201c<\/span>immediate emotional insight that any novelist must envy.\u201d Novelistic is a great way to describe Ronan\u2019s talents because she always manages to convey huge interior feelings in minute, delicate ways. This performance style works well for her role in Atonement<\/i> because the audience must register Briony\u2019s dramatic misinterpretations of events, the careful working out in her mind what she thinks she sees. <\/span><\/p>\n Briony Tallis\u2019 vivid imagination runs wild with fairy tales of princesses and enchanted chalices. She pursues her love of writing with an intense vigor, corralling her cousins to perform a play she\u2019s written for her brother\u2019s visit that evening. Ronan\u2019s clipped, no-nonsense speech as she governs her unwilling participants is echoed in the scene in <\/span>On Chesil Beach<\/i> when Florence, a young woman devoted to music just as much as Briony is to writing, orders her beloved quartet to pick up the pace. Both characters are so dedicated to their craft that it blinds them to the realities of the outside world. Florence\u2019s focus is not on her impending marriage but on her dream of playing the Wigmore Hall with her quartet. She does not even share the news of her engagement with them because she worries they will excommunicate her. Florence values her working relationship with the quartet far more than her romantic one with her future husband, and this largely contributes to the erosion of her marriage. As a child, Briony has difficulty separating fact from her florid fictions \u2014 and this leads to dangerous consequences. She inadvertently gets Robbie incarcerated because the idea that he was the one to rape her cousin makes narrative sense with the disconcerting events of the day: the fountain tableau, the graphic note he wrote, and his sexual encounter with Cecilia in the library. In the storybooks, it would clearly be Robbie who committed the crime. He becomes the diabolical Sir Romulous of Briony\u2019s fable. <\/span><\/p>\n Ronan\u2019s simmering performance style perfectly suits On Chesil Beach<\/i> for the role of a woman crumbling beneath her rosy fa\u00e7ade. Florence\u2019s all-consuming tension and apprehension about consummating the marriage gives new meaning to the term \u201cblushing bride\u201d and looms over the room like the grey clouds of Dorset outside. Her unease radiates during their quiet dinner through her shifting feet and darting eyes \u2014 as if she\u2019s searching for some sort of rescue. Ronan uses a similar sharp, upper-class British accent as Briony\u2019s to convey Florence\u2019s priggishness. <\/span><\/p>\n On Chesil Beach<\/i> and Atonement<\/i> both deal with the loss of innocence. For Florence, the erotic fumbling with her husband on the marriage bed is far too terrifying and she flees to the beach. While there are brief flashbacks that hint at other factors, Florence\u2019s adverse sexual terror has more to do with the era\u2019s puritanical mores. Growing up, Florence receives zero guidance from her mother and learns about sex for the first time from a manual that mechanically describes the act in aberrant, invasive ways with images of blood and strange fluids. Since Briony is a young girl, she knows little to nothing about sex. This naivet\u00e9 is her undoing as she misconstrues moments of sexual tension between Cecilia and Robbie as sinister and their copulation in the library as an aggressive attack. Both characters are thrust into a mysterious erotic adult world with no easy answers or happy endings. They come to understand that life is not as easily defined or controlled as the art they make.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Saoirse Ronan\u2019s delicate interiority exquisitely captures the complex and contradictory aspects of her characters: Briony\u2019s budding sexuality and immaturity, her jealousy of Cecilia and infatuation with Robbie, Florence\u2019s deep-seated traumas and profound remorse for not being able to fulfill her husband\u2019s needs, her desire for his body and fear of it. <\/span>This acting style personifies the sumptuous detail and intimacy of Ian McEwan\u2019s writing. \u201cIan\u00a0is\u00a0someone\u00a0who\u00a0writes women incredibly skillfully, with a\u00a0well-rounded perspective,\u201d Saoirse told Newsweek. \u201cI’d like\u00a0to\u00a0play another one written\u00a0by\u00a0him\u00a0every\u00a010 years.\u201d Such a partnership with McEwan\u2019s canon would produce a fascinating overarching depiction of womanhood. T<\/span>he roles of Briony and Florence in Atonement <\/i>and On Chesil Beach <\/i><\/span>are beguiling cinematic bookends <\/span>of Saoirse Ronan\u2019s journey thus far from magnificent child actress to one of this generation\u2019s most inspiring leading ladies.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2008, 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan received her first Oscar nomination for Atonement, a British WWII melodrama based on an Ian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":534,"featured_media":9365,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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