Set in 1924 and taking place mostly on two English country estates, “Mothering Sunday” looks as though it could be another starched British import. We all know the type — polite, so-so entries that somehow get by on charm, atmosphere and an American audience’s Anglophilia.
“Mothering Sunday” is not that. It’s a French movie, at least in the sense that it has a French director. It has full frontal nudity (both sexes), love scenes that look like the participants actually mean it, and an intense focus on a young woman’s emotional journey and consciousness. The characters speak English, but “Mothering Sunday” has the patience and psychological penetration of a first-rate French film.
The last time we saw Odessa Young,she was in “Shirley,”getting blown off the screen byElisabeth Moss. Moss has a way of doing that with her co-stars. But here, under director Eva Husson’s gaze, Young becomes a figure of mystery and fascination in the role of Jane, a former foundling now working as a housemaid for the wealthy Niven family. Somehow, we understand — through Jane’s bearing, self-possession and fearlessness — that she will someday be a great woman.
Nivens, played by Olivia Colman and Colin Firth, are relatively peripheral characters, and it says something good about Colman and Firth that they took these roles and understood their possibilities. They play a wife and husband responding in opposite ways to the life-destroying grief of their sons having been killed in World War I. Mrs. Niven is sad and inconsolable, while Mr. Niven tries to distance himself from his feelings without much success.
Firth smiles here in a way we haven’t seen before, like he’s simultaneously smiling and asking permission to smile. It’s an expression that’s so underlaid with pain that there’s an impulse to look away.
“Mothering Sunday” takes place on a single day, the maid’s day off. Jane is spending it with her secret lover, Paul (Josh O’Connor), the last remaining son of the wealthy Sheringham family. Paul and Jane have been together for some time, but now Paul is set to marry a woman in his social circle named Emma (Emma D’Arcy). It’s strongly suggested that the marriage is no love match, but something the young people are doing to assuage the grief of their parents.
There are elements of class at work — it is simply understood that Paul cannot marry Jane — but fortunately, thanks to the precision of the performances and of Husson’s direction, this is not about exploitation. Jane knows she is his equal. Aspiring to be a writer, she has a quality shared by many great literary artists, the rare courage to see things for what they are. A scene in which Jane contently strolls around completely naked in her lover’s empty manor house is a study of someone quite literally at home in her own skin.
The movie skillfully intersperses scenes from Jane’s day off with other sequences that go back in time to her and Paul’s courtship and forward into the future, showing a slightly older Jane getting established as a writer. It’s all interesting, except for the brief flashes into the distant future, showing Jane as an old woman (Glenda Jackson) and literary lioness.
数“拜望双亲日”是一个突破ng, as well as one for Husson, who deserves the international career that “Mothering Sunday” all but guarantees. It would be nice if the movie werealsoa breakthrough for the British period drama, signaling a shift in emphasis from manners to internal states, but don’t bet on it.
“Mothering Sunday” is most likely a one-of-a-kind hybrid, a brilliant one-off.
N“Mothering Sunday”:Drama. Starring Odessa Young and Josh O’Connor. Directed by Eva Husson. (R. 104 minutes.) Opens Friday, April 1, at Opera Plaza Cinema, 601 Van Ness Ave. S.F. Wider release April 8.