ON CHESIL BEACH

Director: Dominic Cooke

2018, UK, 110, R

Screenwriter: Ian McEwan, based on his novel

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle, Emily Watson, Anne-Marie Duff, Jonjo O’Neill.

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Saoirse Ronan may be the Meryl Streep of her generation – she seems to effortlessly inhabit a wide range of characters, from an Irish immigrant (Brooklyn), a teenage American (Lady Bird), to a precocious assassin (Hanna). Her newest role, in a film based on the novel by Ian McEwan, is that of Florence, a sexually naïve young upper-class English woman who plays in a string quartet. The film opens in still stuffy 1962, as she is on her honeymoon in Dorset with her husband, a handsome scholarship student who wants to be a historian. As the film moves back and forth in time, we see the adults they become, the knowledge they gain, and everything that has slipped away.