VOD film review: Mothering Sunday
Review Overview
Drama/Structure
5Direction/Performances
7Awkward wandering
6Matthew Turner | On 27, Dec 2021
Director: Eva Husson
Cast: Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor, Sope Dirisu, Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Glenda Jackson, Emma D’Arcy, Patsy Ferran
Certificate: 15
Directed by French filmmaker Eva Husson (Bang Gang) and scripted by Alice Birch (Lady Macbeth, Succession), this sensual, evocative period drama is adapted from the 2016 novel by Graham Swift. As such, it’s beautifully shot, superbly acted and racier than its Downton Abbey-style surface trimmings might lead you to expect, but it’s also marred by structural issues that render the story frustratingly uneven.
Primarily the story of a love affair, the film begins in rural 1924 England, where the majority of neighbouring families have all lost their sons in the war. The exception is Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor), who’s engaged to marry his late brother’s fiancée Emma Hobday (Emma D’Arcy), but is secretly having an affair with 22 year old housemaid Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), who works for neighbouring couple the Nivens (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman).
Over the course of Mother’s Day, various families gather at the Nivens’ estate, leaving the Sheringham house empty, so Paul invites Jane there for what might be their last sexual encounter before his marriage. The events of the afternoon eventually lead to Jane becoming a writer, as we see in two future time periods, one where she’s happily married to a philosopher (Sope Dirisu) and another where she’s a much older woman (Glenda Jackson) recalling her career.
Young delivers an enigmatic, thoughtful turn as Jane that suggests she’s internalising everything, storing up all her emotions and life experience for her desired future career. Her relationship with O’Connor is nicely observed – there’s never any suggestion that they might run away together, as both understand their situation in terms of social status and taboo.
There’s also strong support from Colin Firth (doing his usual thing, but doing it well) and Olivia Colman, who makes the most of her relatively limited screen time (it’s practically a cameo) to deliver a terrific speech, soaked in wrenching anger and grief, about how being an orphan, like Jane, is a great gift because you have no one to care about and can be free.
Husson’s direction is striking in the 1924 sequences, creating an intensely intimate atmosphere that’s heightened through a large amount of onscreen nudity from both Young and O’Connor. That said, it does backfire slightly, because there’s a (very) lengthy sequence where Jane is wandering around the empty Sheringham house completely naked and it’s impossible not to picture a crew member hovering just off camera with a warm blanket.
The 1924 sequences are further heightened by gorgeous costumes by the one and only Sandy Powell and suspiciously sunny cinematography – it is supposed to be March, after all – from Jamie D Ramsay, which adds considerably to the Downton Abbey-ness of it all.
However, the film also has a number of problems. For one thing, the two other time periods add next to nothing to the story, other than confirming that Jane does, indeed, become successful. Worse than that, they don’t even connect very well, so there’s no real sense of how the events of 1924 affect Jane on an emotional level.
On top of that, the film makes a big deal of Jane being a writer, but it completely eschews any narration or voiceover, so we never see or hear anything she actually writes. That seems an odd decision, not least because it denies Jane her interior voice, something that’s obviously a big part of the novel, but isn’t conveyed here.
Ultimately, this is very much a film of two halves. The 1924 sequences are beautifully shot, touchingly romantic and suffused with an atmosphere of strong emotion, but the later sequences fail to make us care about Jane’s subsequent life and career and the end result is frustrating.