Is On Chesil Beach, the film based on Ian McEwan’s novel, a “period piece?”

 Sounds odd to call a film set in the sixties and seventies a “period piece,” but On Chesil Beach, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, so carefully and intentionally recreates the minutest details of the distinctive clothes, hairstyles, foods, furnishings and music of those years, that it could be called a museum piece. Attitudes too: young people who think nothing of walking seven miles each way, in “plimsols” and ballerina flats, to meet each other. Well brought up girls whose sole preparation for the conjugal night is a euphemistic sex manual. The central conflict of the story is equally inseparable from its era: the upheaval between the early sixties before the “Sex Revolution” and a decade later, the “Free Love” seventies. I enjoyed watching the film last night on Netflix.