Mothering Sunday (2021)

Directed by: Eva Husson | 110 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor, Nathan Chester Reeve, Samuel Barlow, Dexter Raggatt, Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Glenda Jackson, Patsy Ferran, Charlie Oscar, Emma D’Arcy, Simon Shepherd, Caroline Harker, Craig Crosbie, Emily Woof, Sope Dirisu, Alex Cubb, Forrest Bothwell, Albert Welling, Sarita Gabony, Steve Brody

Philosopher Donald (Sope Dirisu) asks Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young) why she became a writer. According to her, there are three secrets underlying this. First, her birth. Second, during her job at the bookstore, the boss gave her the discarded typewriter. And third,… this remains a secret. Donald smiles, hoping Jane will tell him again someday. The third secret will slowly unfold in the gripping ‘Mothering Sunday’, a film with great nostalgia for a lost time.

For this cozy drama, based on the book of the same name by Graham Swift, director Eva Husson has opened a can of English acting cannons. Colin Firth plays the slightly absent-minded Mr. Godfrey Niven. Like an agitated Labrador, this landlord waddles backwards after his petulant and haughty wife, Mrs. Claire Niven, on. A perfect role for Olivia Colman. But in the end, as Jane, the bright and libertine maid, Young steals the show. From the first fleeting encounter, the betrothed son of a family friend, Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor), can’t take his eyes off Jane. Harmoniously, O’connor rides along on Young’s blistering level and puts down the shrewd Paul with just the right intensity. Under all this juicy British acting, it is a bit of a shame that there is relatively little screen time for certain actors.

The non-chronological narrative and sometimes fragmentary montage of ‘Mothering Sunday’ fits in appropriately with the writing style that main character Jane develops, which can be linked to the stream-of-consciousness way of writing of Virginia Woolf, among others. In the voice-over you can hear how the writer Jane tries to express the human thought process and his emotional world as truthfully as possible in language. And based on the 24 hours of ‘Mothering Sunday’, the religious version of Mother’s Day, director Husson takes great care to keep the plot clear.

The book adaptation is mainly about Jane’s development, but it also alludes to the disillusionment among the British elite after the First World War. The loss of many sons at the front shook an age-old status quo in their society. The continuation of the power and traditions of the upper classes proved increasingly precarious because they were strongly linked to consanguinity. On the other hand, the orphaned maid Jane moves through life a little more freely. After a secret encounter with Paul, she wanders stark naked through the Sheringham mansion – no one to notice or reprimand her. Though there is tragedy at the core of her existence as an orphan, Jane’s calling seems at the same time less dependent on where her cradle is but more on her urge for freedom. This also casts a begrudging look at the future of the British.

Although the art direction resembles ‘Downton Abbey’, Husson’s film is less gloomy about early twentieth-century England. Still, ‘Mothering Sunday’ has a persistent nostalgia for that period. It seems less mesmerized by the crippling effects of the class system than, say, ‘Gosford Park’ (Robert Altman, 2001). Altman’s film, a venomous satire wrapped in an ode to the Agatha Christie Whodunit, observes old England as an ant colony, in which each person plays a fixed radar in the metronome of the master of the house. But most of the time the metronome runs out of time, because humans simply have the urge to escape from an assigned spot. All in all, ‘Mothering Sunday’ lingers in a sweet-voiced longing for a society where the top dominated and plunged the world into a great war. This mainly involved casualties among the rest. Jane has to admit that, right?