Words like “devices” and “lawyer” ripple across time in this vaguely ambitious but richly detailed British film based on Graham Swift’s novella, words excavated from memory and recorded on the blank page with the stroke of a typewriter key or the flourish of a pencil in a literary ritual of creation.
The writer mining her past for inspiration here is Jane Fairchild (Young), though her authorial identity isn’t clear early in the film’s narrative, which neatly jumbles its chronology into three discrete sections with an imaginative sense for revelation. When you first meet 22-year-old Jane in the predominant first section, she is working as a maid for a wealthy but visibly sad older couple, Godfrey and Clarrie Nivens (Firth and Colman), at a stately manor somewhere in pastoral England during the years following World War I. The principal memory being recalled for a chunk of the film takes place on the titular spring day in 1924. Yet the orphaned Jane has no mother to return home to while her employers attend an alfresco luncheon with two neighboring (and equally moneyed) couples celebrating the upcoming nuptials of their grown children, the barrister-to-be Paul Sheringham (O’Connor) and his petulant fiancée Emma Hobday (D’Arcy). Left to her own devices (the phrase Mr. Nivens uses when giving Jane the day off), Jane cycles to a nearby estate to meet Paul, her secret and long-standing paramour, for a few stolen hours of languid sex and shared intimacies. It’s a bittersweet and likely final tryst given that he — the sole Sheringham heir, as it turns out — will say “I do” in 11 days. (The chime of church bells during the lovers’ waning time together is a cruel reminder of their diverging futures.) It’s an Upstairs, Downstairs down-low romance, but with a literally and emotionally naked twist.
While the movie’s nonlinear construction is its selling point, at least for those moviegoers who prefer a bit of a challenge, an underlying vibe of melancholy gives Mothering Sunday thematic weight. A veil of grief hangs over the film, as the three families collectively struggle with the loss of their social circle’s elder sons in the First World War, resorting to arranging loveless marriages to keep the bloodlines of their ever-dying class pitifully alive. But when tragedy bookends its beautifully realized first segment, the film no longer has anywhere to go, providing glimpses into Jane’s subsequent life that are nothing as inspiring as her fated relationship with the young man who could never be hers to truly love. Not even the oblique appearance of grande dame Jackson (how the movies have missed her!), in what amounts to little more than a cameo, comes close to matching the film’s initial brush with virtuosity. But the memory of those precious valedictory hours spent by Jane and Paul in that bedroom one Sunday afternoon long ago, as recalled by the elder Jane and witnessed by you, is enough to sustain Mothering Sunday. Admirably brave and strangely poignant in this centerpiece scene, Young and O’Connor speak to one another in little more than a whisper, but their words mark a conversation that rings more loudly than that ecclesiastical carillon.
This article appears in April 8 • 2022.
