As last night’s Saturday Night Live parody trailer for lesbian time dramas feels familiar, it’s because it cheats liberally Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Ammonite, Both feature melancholic women falling in love with their female companions, away from the world of men, surrounded by rocky beaches and in candlelight baths. A doctor diagnoses Carey Mulligan at the beginning of the sketch as ‘seagull sounds, gray sky and long, rocky walks’. She is admonished by Heidi Gardner to pluck rocks and put them in a basket incorrectly, but eventually they hook up and sketch their portraits of each other because it’s a lesbian period drama and that’s what you get in a lesbian period -drama doen. “Witness the saddest flirtation in the world,” the voice in the trailer forces you, because it’s a lesbian period drama, and quality or originality is doomed, ‘you get one a year.’
