Mothering Sunday (15, 104 min)
Verdict: Gorgeously, ineffably English
Rating: 
Cry Macho (12, 104 min)
Verdict: A Mexican-American turkey
Rating: 
Watching Mothering Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it felt like a genuine privilege to be English.
I was sitting next to a German critic who, as we filed out at the end, told me she had been thoroughly bored throughout. There may even have been a fierce expletive.
Well, I adored it. But it is so ineffably English, a kind of cinematic version of a ploughman’s lunch at a Chilterns pub, that it is, indeed, hard to imagine anyone not from Britain truly grasping all its nuances.
An adaptation of Graham Swift’s 2016 novel, Eva Husson’s film unfolds, mostly, on an unseasonally warm Mother’s Day in 1924. Jane Fairchild, charmingly played by the Australian actress Odessa Young, is a maid at the handsome Home Counties home of the Nivens (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman), over whom the long shadow of the Great War still falls. They, like their good friends the Sheringhams, lost sons on the Western Front.
Watching Mothering Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it felt like a genuine privilege to be English. Pictured: Paul, played by Josh O'Connor
Firth performs his kindly, repressed, upper-class Englishman act to absolute perfection. But in a way, Colman is the cleverer bit of casting. We are so used to that toothy dazzler of hers, a smile that could guide ships through fog, that not to see it at all is faintly disorientating.
Mrs Niven, it emerges, was heaps of fun in the old days. But now she radiates only misery and irascibility, and her daily trigger is her mild husband’s attempted bonhomie. ‘Godfrey, for goodness sake!’ she snaps, her fuse shortened by grief.
So much for the Jazz Age. So often in the movies, the 1920s roar; here, they weep.
Meanwhile, and here’s the nub of the story, Jane is having a passionate affair, necessarily clandestine because of its affront to class boundaries, with the Sheringhams’ only surviving son, Paul (Josh O’Connor). He is a law student, about to marry the imperious daughter of a third set of friends, the Hobdays.
On Mothering Sunday, when nice Mr Niven gives Jane the day off, she cycles over to the Sheringhams’ home for a tryst with Paul before he has to motor down to Henley to join his parents, along with the Nivens and Hobdays, for a picnic lunch and stilted conversation on the banks of the Thames.
Jane Fairchild, charmingly played by the Australian actress Odessa Young (pictured), is a maid at the handsome Home Counties home of the Nivens (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman), over whom the long shadow of the Great War still falls
With a cameo for Glenda Jackson as the elderly Jane Fairchild, Alice Birch’s beautifully crafted screenplay moves us from that 1924 day back and forth through time.
These skips forward and back gradually fill in the story; it’s like doing a really pleasurable jigsaw. But the spiritual heart of the film is when Jane, left alone at the Sheringhams’ home after Paul has reluctantly gone to join his own kind, languidly wanders naked through the big house, further defying all the social rules she is already breaking by being his secret lover.
There’s a lot of nudity in this film, including a lingering full-frontal of O’Connor that I wouldn’t mention except that his lovely performance is strikingly reminiscent of his Prince Charles in The Crown — a privileged young man in love with the wrong woman — so it’s rather startling to get such an eyeful of, as it were, the crown jewels.
Morgan Kibby’s gorgeous score — all plinky piano and plaintive strings — also deserves acknowledgment. It
