“Once upon a time,” begins any good fairy tale. Though it too begins with this simple phrase, “Mothering Sunday” is no such fairy tale. Rather than dragons, knights, and princesses, filmmaker Eva Husson offers us a maid, a trio of bourgeois families, and a lush yet ultimately bleak view of post-World War I England. The film marks a great tonal departure from Husson’s last trip to the Croisette, “Girls of the Sun,” her 2018 war film about a female battalion in Kurdistan.
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Rather than depicting the brutal viscera of being in the thick of war, Husson turns her focus to its equally grim aftermath. An adaptation of Graham Swift’s 2016 novella of the same name, “Mothering Sunday,” portrays an illicit affair between an English household’s maid and a beloved son in a neighboring estate in the wake of the first World War. The resulting film is a thoughtful if occasionally melodramatic reflection on the nature of grief. The rich, unfiltered sexuality will lure the “Normal People” and “Bridgerton” crowds, while the English bourgeois ambiance ought to snag the “Downton Abbey” and “Sanditon” fans. But the film’s frequent temporal disruptions, likely a formal homage to Swift’s book, muddle the delivery of its plot.
Watch 3 New Clips From Eva Husson’s ‘Mothering Sunday’ Starring Odessa Young and Josh O’Connor
The year is 1924, and a young maid named Jane Fairchild (a luminous Odessa Young) finds herself in the midst of a passionate, secret affair with Paul Sheringham (an equally wonderful Josh O’Connor), the last surviving son of a trio of bourgeois families which includes Jane’s employers, the Nivens. Jane entertains aspirations of becoming a writer someday, while Paul entertains his parents’ aspirations to become a lawyer and marry Emma Hobday, the other surviving child. It’s an ill-fitting match, especially considering that Paul is much more besotted with the Nivens’ maid than his betrothed. Then again, when has the English class system ever cared about feelings?
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“Surviving” is an operative word here, considering the tragic reality that the three families—the Nivens, the Sheringhams, and the Hobdays—have already lost four children to the war. Dick, Freddy, James, and Philip’s names become an almost-ghostly incantation throughout the film as if merely repeating their names will somehow summon them back. Indeed, the looming specter of loss from World War I casts a grim shadow on the English upper-class festivities, as the film eulogizes a lost generation of young men whose places can never be filled. “They’re all gone,” laments Mr. Niven (Colin Firth, in a part rather more like Mr. Bennet than Mr. Darcy). Perhaps because of this loss, “Mothering Sunday” feels like an extended epilogue for times past, a vision of life after happiness is gone. It makes sense that nostalgia is such a powerful force in the film, one tethering its characters back to any sense of place and happiness: Paul fondly reflects on his childhood, the impromptu picnics he and his brothers used to entertain with their family friends, their morning ventures into the cold with hot chocolate and blankets. Because after all, who wants to remember the present when it’s as bleak as this?
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Husson’s vision of memory is perhaps where the film feels most unwieldy. Swift’s novel has the advantage of structuring the narrative around Jane’s interview answers from her later years; Husson tries to imitate this form with sparing voiceovers, flashbacks, and flash-forwards. The result in the cinematic medium is much choppier, often to a fault. The last act, in particular, fast-forwards to Jane’s life as an older adult, in which she writes professionally and has a relationship with a philosopher named Donald (Sope Dirisu). However, this addendum may have been faithful to the novel; it feels tacked-on and unearned. What, exactly, is its purpose—to illustrate that Jane must be “comprehensively bereaved” to quote Mrs. Niven before she can write her great novel?
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The great novel in question presents another hurdle for Husson, who prefers a quick-cut approach when depicting the creative process. Quick flashes of spoken words scrawled in pencil or punched out with a typewriter so forcefully the ink resembles embroidery. That Jane is a writer, an “occupational observer of humanity,” as Donald puts it, feels a smidge tropey. Past films of “Mothering Sunday”’s ilk have likewise depicted the creative process, from Saoirse Ronan burning the midnight oil with individual papers in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 “Little Women” to Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf murmuring the opening lines to “Mrs. Dalloway” with a cigarette hanging daintily from her elegant fingers in 2002’s “The Hours.” It’s difficult, after all, to represent the gravitas of a process that’s so interior. There’s not much action to be found in a person sitting alone in a room with a pen. Moreover, asserting that this is Jane’s reclamation of her own agency feels slightly thin when the prose itself is missing (another deficiency of the visual medium; by definition, the novel presents the author’s language for evaluation, which in turn convinces us of the caliber of Jane’s).
Perhaps a more compelling reclamation of Jane’s power occurs not through the written word but through a powerful visual fantasy. In an extended sequence following a tryst with Paul, Jane wanders the corridors of Upleigh completely nude; for an afternoon, she’s the mistress of the house, smoking a cigarette in the library and lunching in the kitchen with a pie and beer. At one point, she emits an unrepressed burp. It’s the most honest gesture of the film: a daring, breathtaking image of a service-class woman satiating all types of hunger, both literal and intellectual. And though it’s short-lived and quickly followed by more tragedy, it’s a well-needed reminder that happiness isn’t always in the past. [B+]
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