Monthly Archives: December 2021

  • Mothering Sunday

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

     

  • Jules and Jim

    Old YorkerFilm review

    François Truffaut (1962)

    When I was eighteen I saw a book in W H Smith, in Coney Street, York that, as soon as I looked at the jacket and checked the contents page, I wanted.  The Great Movies, newly published at the time, is the work of an American author, William Bayer (son of the screenwriter Eleanor Perry, to whom the book is dedicated).  The front cover announced, above the block-capitals title, that ‘In cinema history, 60 films deserve to be called …’  I wanted the book because the sixty included my then favourite film, Cabaret (1972), and the introductory words on the cover seemed an appealingly authoritative confirmation of greatness.  Bayer, who has subsequently had a successful career writing mainly crime fiction, isn’t himself a great writer about film.  His methodology – he defines twelve genres (some of them overlapping) and selects five movies to represent each one – is a dubious means of constructing a canon.  His short essays stand up well enough, though, and I’ve always been grateful for his book.  It introduced me to films I’d not yet seen, have since come to love, and which would be at least contenders for a personal top-sixty list – All About Eve, Bonnie and Clyde, Dr Strangelove …, La dolce vita, 8½, Les enfants du paradis, The 400 Blows, From Here to Eternity, M, The Manchurian Candidate, On the Waterfront, Persona, Psycho (along with Cabaret).  The downside of the book’s canonical flavour, in 1974, was that it intimidated me.  I was nervous of voicing negative thoughts about any of the sixty classics – just as I was at the time, and later, about disparaging films I didn’t like that more articulate friends did.  One plus of getting old is that I’m easier speaking my mind (at least on these web pages).  A few years ago, I walked out of one of William Bayer’s selections – Only Angels Have Wings.  I now don’t mind admitting that I’d pay good money to avoid watching another of them, The Wild Bunch, again.  And there are plenty of films on Bayer’s list I rate somewhere between the two extremes – worth seeing, even repeatedly, but falling a little short of greatness.  They include Jules and Jim.

    Truffaut’s third feature (following The 400 Hundred Blows (1959) and Shoot the Pianist (1960)), Jules and Jim celebrates bohemian life in the years before and after the First World War, and dramatises, through a love triangle, the relative claims and weight of male friendship and heterosexual passion.  The protagonists are two contrasting young men, both writers, and one extraordinary young woman.  Jules (Oskar Werner) is a shy Austrian, Jim (Henri Serre) a more self-confident Frenchman.  The capricious, enigmatic Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) – she demands and practises the sexual freedoms enjoyed by men but can also be a clinging vine – fascinate them both.  In the summer of 1914, Jules marries Catherine.  This doesn’t weaken the bond between him and Jim – nor, in the event, does the imminent conflict in which they fight on opposite sides.  Once the War is over, Jim comes to stay with Jules and Catherine and their little daughter Sabine (Sabine Haudepin) at their home in the Black Forest.  Jules confides in his friend about his wife’s inconstancy – Catherine has had numerous affairs and spends periods of time away from her family.  She now tries to seduce Jim who, although he has a fiancée, Gilberte (Vanna Urbino), back in Paris, is still attracted to Catherine.  Jules encourages the liaison:  that way, he tells Jim, ‘she’ll still be ours’.  They live as a ménage à trois until tensions between Jim and Catherine, resulting chiefly from their failure to have a child of their own, break up the relationship.  Jim returns to France.  A reunion is on the cards when Catherine becomes pregnant; it doesn’t happen, thanks to Jules writing to tell Jim of her miscarriage.  When Catherine and Jules move to France, a chance meeting with Jim rekindles old passions and discords:  after Jim announces his intention to marry Gilberte, Catherine pulls a gun on him, though he manages to escape.  Sometime later, another chance meeting, in a cinema, leads to the trio going on a drive together.  During a stop at a café, Catherine persuades Jim (you feel he’s asking for trouble) to get into the car with her:  she has something important to tell him.  As Jules watches, Catherine drives the car off a nearby bridge into the river.  Jules is left to arrange the funerals of his wife and friend, and the burial of their ashes in Père-Lachaise.

    I think this was the third time I’d seen Jules and Jim (over a period of some forty years) and I’ve been less impressed each time I’ve returned to it.  The source material is a semi-autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roché.  The screenplay, by Truffaut and Jean Gruault, includes large chunks of voiceover narration.  I don’t know if these are lifted straight from the novel but, in a film as visually alive as this one is, the narration gets to feel superfluous, despite Michel Subor’s brisk, elegant delivery.  There’s so much philosophy of love (and woman-as-the-other) stuff to listen to that Jules and Jim can feel like French cinema parody.  At this distance in time, it’s hard not to think the film’s original impact had more to do with the freshness of the camerawork (Raoul Coutard was the cinematographer) and the fast cutting (Claudine Bouché edited) than with the themes of the story that Truffaut tells.  This is grudging, though, when there are so many good things in the film.  All three principals are excellent.  Jeanne Moreau, with her uncanny knack for seeming volatile and no nonsense at the same time, is perfectly cast as Catherine.  Her singing of ‘Le tourbillon’, a song composed for the film by Serge Rezvani aka Boris Bassiak (who also appears in Jules and Jim as one of Catherine’s ex-lovers) is justly famous.  The narrative spans more than twenty years – from 1910, when Jules and Jim first meet, to footage of Nazi book-burning in the mid-1930s.  A particularly strong aspect of Oskar Werner’s and Henri Serre’s portraits is that Jim, subtly but definitely, appears to get older whereas Jules continues to look the same – this seems to chime with the different scope of the two men’s personalities to adapt to new circumstances.  Truffaut’s choice of a wide range of locations, in France and Germany, is highly convincing (the production designer, Fred Capel, also did the clothes).  Georges Delerue’s music has great emotive fluency – it’s romantic yet amusing.  Truffaut makes judicious, telling use of archive film inserts.  The Parisian street scenes, remarkably, are no less striking than the footage of the Great War.

    10 November 2021

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