The same dynamics were used in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a period piece set to a similar rhythm, as strangers adapt to each other, making cautious, faltering hints at intimacy in the face of isolation and social constraints. The colour palette and tones are similar to Ammonite, with a rugged island landscape, swirling wind, and surf rushing sinuously up the shoreline contrasted with interiors of shadows and golden firelight.
This same sense of expansive time, of immersion, is a feature of Call Me by Your Name. Released in 2017, the film is a sun-drenched paean to first love, set in Northern Italy, depicting a summer romance between the son of Jewish academics and a graduate student lodging with the family. At times, the atmospheric cinematography makes Call Me by Your Name feel like a sensual reverie. While a gay story, it is at least as much a naturalistic portrayal of the fire of first love and the ache and devastation of its passing.
God's Own Country, released in 2017, is equally slow-burning and immersive. Johnny takes care of the day-to-day running of his family's Yorkshire farm after his father suffers a stroke. The interactions between Johnny and a Romanian migrant worker, and the cinematography are rendered just as vividly as the similar films in this genre, with vast landscape shots, turbulent cloud, pallid skies, and low glare.
In all of these films, when the expanses of time open up, the viewer feels the tensions of urgency and yearning, the wariness of strangers hardened by repression and loneliness. All the films have the same sense of transience: strangers arriving, their presence imposed upon a character, often against their will and the implication of their inevitable departure. This common premise adds tensions to the pain of revelation and the wild emotions of the ensuing love affairs.
In the modern world, with the cheapened, ubiquitous nature of sex and relationships, the dulled permissiveness of apps and all our cultural tensions, period drama LGBT stories have the effect of instilling a kind of heterosexual cultural nostalgia for romance and the volatility of passion.
The films are beautiful works of art in and of themselves but carry this latent, half-conscious yearning. LGBT romance stories have always been able to transpose romance into a higher key, because of the ever-present dangers of exposure, the illicit and the volatility of characters potentially rejecting their own desires as well as someone else's.
The films are so engrossing because of the heightened stakes, the potential for misinterpretation of coded signalling.
The success of these modern films is due also to the foregrounding of romantic infatuation. Each adheres to the same structure. Characters assess and feel each other out for at least the first, and often the second act of the film, with the sexual release usually reserved for the third act. The focus, then, is on the universal relatability of attraction, rather than the means by how it is expressed, and between whom.
Additionally, the films all seem to transcend the pettiness of identity politics and the abrasive discussions about who can portray whom in art and entertainment: most of the actors and actresses in these films are heterosexual. Taking on a "queer" role used to be something actors might do as a one-off, to show their versatility and sensitivity. Now, such roles are mainstream.
At a deeper level, the trend of these films may reflect cultural change in the apprehension of sexuality, especially notions of fluidity and the idea that fantasy doesn't necessarily have to define someone's orientation. A study on gay, straight, and bisexual men's porn preferences published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that 21 per cent of straight men reported watching same-sex porn in the preceding six months.
A survey of 4000 women by Cosmopolitan found that 84 per cent of straight women had watched lesbian porn, and 20 per cent preferred it. At a latent level, many people may be watching these films to explore these aspects of themselves, at a highly aestheticised remove.
This may account for another interesting dynamic: the protracted sweaty couplings in these films are often way longer and more frank than the sex scenes in their hetero equivalents.
Such films may be an engaging way for someone to explore what turns them on, without necessarily meaning they want to express themselves in such ways in real life.
Ammonite is the latest in a string of films that manage the extraordinary feat of paying homage to the social and erotic daring of queer figures from the past, while simultaneously channelling an evolving diversity of sexuality in the present.
Ammonite is in cinemas now.
