There’s a tasteful ennui and gorgeous torpor to this well-acted movie, set in Britain’s Home Counties between the wars — in which the middle-aged ruling classes are quietly stricken with misery about almost all their sons being slaughtered on the French battlefields. The film is adapted by screenwriter Alice Birch from the 2016 novella by Graham Swift, and directed by Eva Husson.
Australian actor Odessa Young plays Jane, the maid at a grand house ruled over by the sad Mr and Mrs Niven (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman) who are not making a fuss about their children being dead. Jane is having a secret, passionate affair with Paul, beguilingly played by Josh O’Connor, the well-born son of the Nivens’ neighbours, the Sheringhams, and on Mothering Sunday, her day off, she has plans to bicycle over to Paul’s house while his parents and servants are away, for a secret assignation.
Paul is the only one of his peer group to have returned from the Front, and burdened by his survivor’s guilt and the realisation that so much is now expected of him: including a prestigious legal career and marriage to someone who isn’t a maid. So Paul and Jane’s afternoon love-making, and Jane’s languid postcoital nude sauntering around his posh house, her fingertips trailing along the spines of first editions, is coloured by this mood of looming loss and regret.
It is a lovely-looking, lovely-sounding movie, handsomely designed, meticulously shot and impeccably performed — and it also has interesting things to say about the emotional toughness and the Greeneian splinter of ice in the heart, that is needed by a writer. But I have to admit that, despite my liking for slow cinema, I found something a bit indulgent and classy about the unvarying andante pace. To use a prehistoric analogy, it often felt like that moment when DJ John Peel accidentally put a 45rpm record on at 33. I wanted a jolt of passion, of anger, of something, to wake this film out of its dreamy melancholy. But then it has to be said that this moonscape is very well crafted and Olivia Colman does, in her way, deliver a jolt of rage mixed with a swallowed despair.
Jane has ambitions to be a writer, and later you see the older, more mature Jane who is in a relationship with academic philosopher Donald (Sope Dirisu) and later Glenda Jackson has a cameo as Jane as the renowned and elderly star author, disconcerting journalists with her unimpressed reaction to news that she has won a certain big prize — a moment amusingly calling to mind Doris Lessing’s famously dismissive response to being told by reporters she had got the Nobel. Jane is an orphan, and Mrs Niven, in her cynical wretchedness and despair, tells her that being born bereaved and motherless is a great gift: she has no-one to care about. Of course, we know that this isn’t true. But Odessa Young shows us that it is not an entirely inaccurate description of Jane; she is tough, she has that writer’s detachment.
There is a lot to admire in this film, though I wanted a bolt of lightning to burst through the cloudcover of sadness.
• Mothering Sunday is released on 12 November in cinemas.
