Mothering Sunday
Eva Husson (2021)
In Oxfordshire, on Mothering Sunday in 1924, Mr and Mrs Niven (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman) are lunching out with similarly upper-class friends. According to convention at the time, servants are given the afternoon off to visit their own mothers but Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), one of the Nivens’ two maids, is an orphan. She goes instead to the nearby home of the Sheringhams (Craig Crosbie and Emily Woof), who are joining the Nivens, the Hobdays (Simon Shepherd and Caroline Harker) and their daughter Emma (Emma D’Arcy) for lunch. Mr and Mrs Sheringham have already left the house, ahead of their son Paul (Josh O’Connor). He is engaged to Emma Hobday, a socially suitable match for whom he feels little. Paul and Jane have been secret lovers for years. They go to bed together before he sets off for the lunch party at which he never arrives. He’s killed in a car crash en route.
These are the pivotal events of Eva Husson’s film, adapted from Graham Swift’s 2016 novel(la) of the same name (which I haven’t read), but Mothering Sunday, with a screenplay by Alice Birch, also moves forward in time from the titular day. Jane leaves service, gets a job in an Oxford bookshop and, when the shop’s owner (Albert Welling) gives her a secondhand typewriter, embarks on a highly successful writing career. She sets up house with Donald (Sope Dirisu), an academic philosopher. He also dies, though of natural causes. Many decades later, the elderly Jane (Glenda Jackson) wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her reaction to the news, received from journalists on her doorstep, brings to mind Doris Lessing’s immediate response to learning of her Nobel in 2007. Having sent the newshounds on their way, Jane returns indoors to remember, in private, Paul and the secrets he confided on what proved to be their last meeting.
At the start, Mr Niven’s upbeat breakfast small talk about the fine weather promised for the day ahead doesn’t conceal his sad eyes and evidently infuriates his wife. It’s soon made clear that Mothering Sunday is a wrenching occasion for the Nivens, both of whose sons were killed in the Great War – so were two of the Sheringhams’ three sons, with Paul the only survivor. The bereavement of parents of a particular generation looks set to be a central theme of the film. Mrs Niven’s sudden, brief loss of self-control during the lunch outing underlines too heavily the putting-on-a-brave-face charade she feels her life has become. Her remarks that night to Jane, helping her mistress prepare for bed, come as a more compelling shock: she envies Jane’s losing her parents when too young to grieve. Unaware of the affair with Paul, Mrs Niven urges her maid to take advantage of her luck in having no one close enough to mourn. In the event, however, this distinctive element of Mothering Sunday is muffled by the premature deaths in peacetime of Paul and Donald. These prompt Jane’s sententious reflection that ‘Maybe all the men in my life have to die in order for me to write my great book’.
The plot as outlined above is more eventful than the film feels as you watch it. The prevailing languor of the 1924 scenes evokes the atmosphere of Edwardian summer screen stories, seemingly oblivious to the psychic chasm between the pre-1914 and post-1918 eras. The English countryside visuals are often lovely and nearly as often predictable – Eva Husson cuts from a washing line, where a sheet billows in the breeze, to a pall of smoke rising from the wreck of Paul’s car as from a funeral pyre. There’s some high-quality acting, most notably from Josh O’Connor, who leaves you interestedly uncertain as to just what melancholy Paul is regretting – his lost brothers, the prescribed married life that seems to await him, the extent to which he has exploited Jane, a combination of all three? As Donald, Sope Dirisu is the latest example of a problem of colour-blind casting. Black philosophy dons at Oxford in the 1930s were hardly ten a penny. You can’t not notice Dirisu’s ethnicity or therefore not wonder what it means to the highly self-aware, vaguely feminist Jane. It’s practically a given of British cinema and television that a sequence involving a press pack will be noisily overdone. Any hopes that Eva Husson, who is French, might do better are dashed in Jane’s crudely staged confrontation with the Nobel Prize messengers. But the director’s nationality and gender do make a difference in other ways.
This is Husson’s third feature but her first with a mostly Anglophone cast. The class differences that are crucial to the story don’t register as clearly as they should: Jane sounds quite posh for a maid raised in an orphanage. When Paul tells her that her mother ‘might have been a queen’, he’s surely meant to be seeing and hearing through the externals. What he says means little since Odessa Young’s Jane neither looks nor sounds socially inferior – she’s a cut above the Nivens’ other maid, Milly (well played by Patsy Ferran). There’s a literary tradition whereby the inherent ‘quality’ of a hero who’s from good stock but consigned by misfortune to a lowly start in life, will always shine through. The cut-glass vowels of the title character in David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948) make sense because John Howard Davies’ screen presence confirms Dickens’s confounding ability to blend polemical social drama and fairytale. The idea feels antiquated now, though. A British director of Mothering Sunday would, at least should, have known better than to let it survive as Husson does. The film’s Jane, as she grows in self-belief and understanding, doesn’t change as much as she should.
The ‘intimacy co-ordinator’, assuming there was one, certainly earned their fee. Both leads appear naked in the bedroom sequences; Odessa Young stays that way for other scenes, too. In Graham Swift’s narrative, after Jane and Paul have had sex, he leaves to meet his parents, his fiancée et al; Jane, alone in the Sheringhams’ house, wanders round it on a how-the-other-half-lives inspection, still undressed. Eva Husson replicates this except that, of course, she leaves nothing to the imagination. Young spends so much screen time unclothed that it’s difficult not to be conscious of the persisting nakedness of the actress, rather than of the character she’s playing. No problem with this, supposedly, because Odessa Young is under a female gaze but how protective is that once a film’s in the public domain, with men and women gazing together? It’s true that Mothering Sunday‘s listlessness is liable to leave as many of the audience snoring as phwoaring but that’s hardly the point.
12 November 2021