Mothering Sunday (2021)
Colin Firth, Odessa Young and Olivia Colman in Mothering Sunday
Mothering Sunday (2021)
Centering on a single day, this is a sharply told tale, even though its action ultimately spans decades. It’s adapted from Graham Swift’s tight, 175-page 2017 novel. And like the novel, the movie offers melancholy speculation about the English class system. It doesn’t depict sweeping social change. Nearly everything in this post-WWI world stays frightfully still, until showing us its heroine’s later triumphs as a writer, who is in fact the teller of the tale we’re watching. It's a world where people behave as though society’s severest fault lines won’t crack. But splinter, ever so slowly, they do.
The director, Eva Husson, and the screenwriter, Alice Birch, have retained the scale of Swift’s novel in depicting England’s slow evolution; and yet they twist the knife a bit more than he does. Decorously, prettily, but ruthlessly, they suggest that England isn’t an evenhanded society. (It's no surprise that Birch was a writer on the marvelous television series Normal People (from the novel by Sally Rooney), which shows contemporary Ireland in a similar stage of transition.)
Husson and Birch giddily take on Swift's story – set largely on March 30, 1924 – to put the British class system under a microscope. Mothering Sunday, somewhat like our Mother's Day, is set aside in English life not just to honor and remember one’s mother. The word “mothering” is Swift's carefully enlisted gerund, from the verb “to mother”, and he makes it suggest that one may need to do more than offer one’s mother good wishes. Could you need mothering that she may not have gotten around to?
That question may be hard for anyone, but can the protagonist, a young maid named Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), even ask it? She’s an orphan, literally a foundling, whose name, she reports, amounts to nothing more than a breezily concocted cliche. “Lots of Janes in England,” she reminds us, and “Fairchild” suggests only shallow goodness and vague smiling fortune. Jane serves in the household of Mr. and Mrs. Niven (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman), an upper-class couple, both of whose sons have died in the Great War, and who live in a kind of wealthy, courteous, splendid sorrow. They give their two maids, Milly (Patsy Ferran) and Jane the day off. Mr. Niven offers Jane money for the day to spend as she likes, just as he knows she'll bicycle where she wants.
He has no idea that motherless Jane will spend a few heated hours of Mothering Sunday with her longtime secret lover, Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor), scion of a nearby wealthy family. Paul and Jane have carried on their assignations undiscovered at various locations, including the outdoors. But today Paul does what he’s never done before. He invites Jane to his family’s mansion, since the servants will be off visiting their mothers, and his parents will be leaving home early. His mother and father are off to a luncheon to honor Paul and his fiancée, Emma (Emma D’Arcy), and Emma’s family, as they and the Nivens salute Paul and Emma’s wedding, which is only two weeks off. Paul has promised to join the luncheon later.
Meanwhile, he and Jane have the Sheringham manse to themselves. Intense sex in Paul’s own bed is the day’s freshest delight. This meeting between the two young lovers will on one hand be nothing new. By now both are practiced in providing mutually satisfying sex, and they’ve explored every nook and cranny of each other’s bodies. These nude scenes are startling not because they’re frank (they are indeed full frontal). What’s surprising is the way nudity becomes a kind of clothing, an outfit. Paul and Jane, stark naked, are hiding from each other the class distinction that inevitably keeps their “love”, including their affection, hidden.
Odessa Young as Jane and Josh O’Connor as Paul in Mothering Sunday
And this is, though Jane doesn’t quite realize it at first, their final tryst. Whether Paul has designed it as such is one of the script’s tantalizing mysteries. Has Paul invited Jane to his home, where the two of them freely prowl the luxuriously appointed house in carefree nakedness, as a kind of farewell? He never uses that word. And we’re left to provide our own answer. Young and O’Connor play these scenes with a wonderful abandon, yet with a respect for the human form, and its fragility, that’s more powerful than sexual aggression, though they don’t stint there, either.
On this particular day Jane can’t picture her own future. And once they’ve made love, and then gamboled about the elegant digs naked, Paul gently lets Jane know that he has to dress for that damned luncheon. It’s the prelude to the wedding that in two weeks will seal his fate as a lawyer, a job prospect he loathes, and a proper husband. He ritually dresses and then drives off, leaving Jane alone to roam the house. Given license by Paul, she stays naked as she ambles through vast, richly appointed rooms she’s only imagined, runs her fingers across books in a massively well-stocked library, eats the food the servants have left for Paul. She barely notices the photos of Paul’s two brothers, both killed in WWI, leaving him the sole heir to his family’s fortune.
What will Jane’s destiny be? We don’t have to guess. Early on, we’re shown the older Jane (Glenda Jackson) at the crowning close of her career as a successful novelist. So, we know where Jane’s journey ends up. Before then, we’ve witnessed the steps the young Jane has taken. In flash forwards after Mothering Sunday, we see her land a job in a bookshop, then take the shop-owner’s gift to her of a typewriter as a challenge to become a writer. This maturing Jane also falls in love with a handsome philosopher, Donald (Sope Dirisu), who’s African, fluent in German, and can behave with wryly accented, ironic, impeccable Englishness. He is Jane’s intellectual equal, but also her goad and champion, since as a writer she’ll be looked upon as an oddity, like Donald, a less than welcome observer of the contradictions in English life.
In the novel, Swift’s transformation of Jane into a writer seems more willed by the author than seized by Jane. But Husson and Birch go full bore on how a life of observation turns into the nurturing of a creator.
Odessa Young as the blossoming writer Jane in Mothering Sunday
In her quiet way, Jane ends up offering a counterlife to the stoically controlled lives she first knew. She reveres the memory of Paul, but by the movie’s end she surely isn’t, and would never wish to be, like him. It’s a transition not from loving to unloving, but from adoration to clear-eyed, respectful remembering.
What most held me about Mothering Sunday was its gossamer cinematography. Jamie Ramsay has shot this movie about loss as if life were blooming everywhere. The colors aren’t just deeply saturated – the tones of the clothing, the stately homes, the powerful greenness in nature, soak deeper into the images as you watch. For Ramsay, beauty isn’t just captivating to the eye, it’s a force pushing life forward.
This is a costume drama without flash but with impeccable taste, judgment and texture. The three-time Oscar winner Sandy Powell (with 15 nominations) has again proven that she knows how to costume not just an era, but the attitudes, drives and heartbreak that clothes and the wearing of them imply. Her costumer’s fine detail and vibrant coloring situate character, never obscure it. Powell is once again a mistress of her craft, a diviner as much as a designer.
Jane doesn't fully understand until later in her life the impermanence of these people to whom she's been a servant and a lover, always at the ready. The upper classes’ fastidious dress, baronial homes and decorous speech can’t guarantee safety, nor even the lives of their own children. This shimmering vulnerability, this aching longing for certainty when life denies it to everyone, no matter how materially blessed, is the movie’s subject. It gains its force through memory, not narrative, from the dedicated task of recollection (re-collection), not summing up.
This will leave some wanting more reasons for Jane’s success. But Swift and the moviemakers tell us that what matters as much as Jane’s success is the view she’s gained of privileged lives. England nearly ensnared her. Almost. Which finally is the same as saying, successfully fight to liberate herself as she does, England made her.