Is that true? French director Eva Husson’s film – based on the 2016 prize-winning novel by Graham Swift and adapted byNormal People’s Alice Birch – is set in 1925,when Jane is 24,but she flashes forward to show us Jane’s life in early middle age and as an old woman (played by Glenda Jackson),now a successful writer recalling her sensuous youth. Jane has,in fact,suffered terrible loss. Husson compares this trajectory through ages to watching a biopic,albeit of someone imaginary.
“Life:it’s a constant quest and constant exploration,” she says. “When you have the privilege of following a character to old age,it sort of reflects that. To have the sass that Glenda Jackson brings to[the old Jane] but then,at the same time,the beauty of it and sense that life is hard. We’re privileged not to be pebbles.”
At least Jane’s bereavements are part of normal life. There must be a different measure for the loss that reconfigured the shattered families emerging from World War I. The Nivens and their close friends the Sheringhams have each lost two boys:only Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor),who was younger than his brothers and their friends,is left. The two clans still meet for picnics,but they are bleakly child-free affairs. Paul still remembers Mrs Niven (Olivia Colman,giving a brief but revelatory performance) jumping into the river and challenging the boys to races that she would invariably win. Her clothes tell us the kind of person she was when she bought them;all colourful embroidery,ethnic prints and patterns. Now she can hardly speak. She is a husk of grief.
So it is up to Paul to fulfil everyone’s expectations:be a lawyer like his father,inherit the estate and marry the bereaved fiancee left over from one of his brothers. He is hemmed in by survivor guilt. This theme of the man trapped by social constraints particularly interested Husson.
Josh O’Connor in Mothering Sunday:“We have to see men understanding their place in the world and looking back at where this has come from.”Transmission Films
“I belong to a generation of women who were shaped by the male gaze,” she says. “Of course,that’s about women,but it’s also a toxic vision of men as strong,reliable,infallible,successful – this is not attainable.” Women filmmakers like her – she also madeGirls of the Sun,shown in Australia pre-pandemic,about a Kurdish women’s army – may be able to offer men “a small side door” to something freer,she believes. “We can’t just depict women and leave men on the side of the road.”
Josh O’Connor,whose memorable roles have included a closeted gay shepherd inGod’s Own Country and Prince Charles inThe Crown,laughs at the suggestion that he has cornered the market on emotionally repressed men. “I do seem to have played a lot of men dealing with masculinity and power and the struggle that brings,” he says. “Someone said to me recently that the likenesses between Prince Charles and Johnny Saxby inGod’s Own Country were extraordinary,and I was saying ‘humm,seriously?’ But it was such a convincing link!
“I think we are seeing more of these roles,because we have to. We have to see men understanding their place in the world and looking back at where this has come from. Why have we had such privilege for such a long time? And how do we exist in a world where we have to acknowledge that privilege? How can we be gentler? How can we engage better?”
Paul’s great secret is that,along with his obligatory engagement,he has slipped into an intense relationship with Jane. On Mothering Sunday,when the servants who still have parents are safely away,Jane cycles over to the Sheringham mansion for some precious hours in Paul’s bed. She is his friend,he tells her. He can say things to her that he can’t tell anyone else. They both know that he could never marry a housemaid. When he drives off to play his usual role as latecomer at the family picnic,Jane wanders around the house,still naked. She is a great reader. She picks out a book from the vast,unused library:Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Josh O’Connor and Odessa Young pursue a forbidden relationship in Mothering Sunday.Transmission Films
The long nude scenes set tongues wagging whenMothering Sunday was unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Not so much that it was scandalous,given that the characters’ nakedness is both appropriate and treated as matter-of-fact,but that it was a great deal to ask of actors. O’Connor seems barely to have noticed it.
“I’m pretty comfortable in that situation,” he says cautiously. “I’m conscious it might come off as sounding really arrogant,but I’m not. We’re all insecure about our bodies and that never goes away,but I love trying to play a character to its total truth. In a film like this,it would be absurd not to have them naked.”
Odessa Young,who can’t be in Cannes thanks to COVID,toldThe Hollywood Reporter it wasn’t hard at all. “It’s probably not so romantic for me to reveal this,but I could do it because I treated my body like a costume. I enjoy the challenge of those moments where you don’t have to rely on written action or written dialogue.” That scene,says Husson,is the centrepiece of both the book and the film. “It tells half the story,” she says. “Stripping these two characters to their naked selves is part of the emotional aspect of the film.”
And the political aspect. “That’s the scene that really excited me to make the film,because I thought it was taking such an important political stance,” she told online magazineCinema Femme. “It’s so powerful in the sense that what you see is a woman who is lower-class doing things that she normally wouldn’t be allowed to do with such simplicity. Her sheer presence in front of the wall of books was political for me.
“You cannot take your eyes off her face”:Odessa Young and Eva Husson at a Mothering Sunday special screening in New York.Getty Images
“When I read that scene,it reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s comments inA Room of One’s Own where she wanders through the aisles of the library and she muses upon the fact that there’s hardly a … female writer on the shelf. Just by her own presence,she belongs there and is an embodiment of the future of creativity.”
Odessa Young is 24. She first made her mark internationally in a leading role when she was 17 inThe Daughter,Simon Stone’s modern reinterpretation of Ibsen’sThe Wild Duck,which showed at the Venice Film Festival in 2015. Eva Husson was drawn to her watching Shirley,in which she plays the houseguest who inspires Elizabeth Moss’ horror writer Shirley Jackson. “She barely speaks in the first part of the film,and yet you cannot take your eyes off her face. You are completely enthralled by her,and that is just a gift,” says Husson. “She has a long career ahead of her.”
Mothering Sunday opens on June 2.
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