My Weekend Crush

Yes, let’s get all the jokes out now. “Portrait of a Lady with Fossils.” “Carol for Rocks.” “The Paleontology Word.” The trailer for “Ammonite,” Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan’s lesbian fossil hunter period romance, is finally upon us and it looks scrumptious but also, um, a tad familiar. Women in frocks. Waves crashing. Bodicies tightening. Unspoken yearning. Women longing for other women while staring sadly into the sea sounds like one of those overly specific genre categories that pops up randomly on Netflix.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Ammonite” the movie features intimate sex scenes between Kate and Saoirse including one that “it makes the 2015 lesbian love drama Carol, an awards contender starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, seem tame.” I mean, they were relatively tame, if you think about it. Kate, who plays real-life fossil hunter Mary Anning, said of the “explicit” scene: 

“Saoirse and I choreographed the scene ourselves. It’s definitely not like eating a sandwich. I just think Saoirse and I, we just felt really safe. Francis was naturally very nervous. And I just said to him, ‘Listen, let us work it out.’ And we did. ‘We’ll start here. We’ll do this with the kissing, boobs, you go down there, then you do this, then you climb up here.’ I mean, we marked out the beats of the scene so that we were anchored in something that just supported the narrative. I felt the proudest I’ve ever felt doing a love scene on Ammonite. And I felt by far the least self-conscious.” 

So there you have it, lesbian sex is definitely not like eating a sandwich. Unless, well, you use a lot of tongue when you eat a sandwich. Ahem.

I am, as always, excited to see another prestige lesbian drama. Kate has always been a favorite actress of mine, and Saoirse is extremely talented as well. May the story take them somewhere new and interesting (i.e. not in morose queer lady tears, ‘cause we’ve all seen that movie too many times already). I mean, some people in history had to have happy endings, right? Let us hope. Happy safe, healthy and righteous weekend, all.