Film Pick of the Week: Mothering Sunday - Review by Yvette Huddleston

Australian actor Odessa Young plays housemaid Jane Fairchild, an orphan who is employed by grieving parents Godfrey and Clarrie Niven (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman) who, like their friends and neighbours the Sheringhams (and most other middle-aged parents at the time) have lost a son in the First World War. Their very English way of coping with this terrible tragedy is to not talk about it at all – Godfrey keeps up a stream of inane chatter while Clarrie sits in sad silence.

It is Mothering Sunday, March 1924 and the Nivens are preparing to meet their friends for a picnic by the river, partly to celebrate the forthcoming wedding of the Sheringhams’ one surviving son Paul (Josh O’Connor) – both his older brothers died on the Western Front – to Emma (Emma D’Arcy), the daughter of their mutual friends the Hobdays, who have also lost a son. It is a seemingly loveless and convenient marriage of social equals – Paul is essentially a replacement for his older, now deceased, brother James, to whom Emma was once engaged.

As her employers will be out for lunch and dinner, Jane is granted the day off, to do as she pleases. What nobody knows is that she and Paul have been conducting a passionate affair and with his nuptials now imminent they are meeting at his parents’ house, where he is supposed to be studying for his law exams and hence excused from the engagement celebrations until later, for a final farewell tryst. There is an elegiac quality to their afternoon together as they make love, talk freely and share secrets – there is clearly a strong connection between them but in a class-bound society their relationship is transgressive and therefore doomed.

Screenwriter Alice Birch’s script handles the source material’s multiple timelines, and the development of Jane’s writerly ambitions adeptly. We get glimpses into Jane’s later life – in middle age as an established novelist happily married to a supportive husband, philosopher Donald (Sope Dirisu), and as an elderly grande dame of letters (a brief cameo from Glenda Jackson), blithely dismissing the bestowing upon her of a prestigious literary prize. It is a beautiful, delicately wrought film, with fine performances, especially from Young and O’Connor, luminous cinematography by Jamie Ramsay and assured, empathetic direction from Husson.