Mothering Sunday

The Architecture of Grief

Period dramas, particularly those set in the English countryside between the wars, often suffer from a specific kind of suffocation. They are usually sealed in amber—beautiful, mannered, and utterly lifeless. But Eva Husson’s *Mothering Sunday* (2021) is not interested in the preservation of history; it is interested in the tactile, messy sensation of memory. Adapted from Graham Swift’s novella, this is less a story about a doomed romance and more a portrait of an artist carving her identity out of the silence left by the dead.

Husson, a French director bringing an outsider’s gaze to the British class system, rejects the stiff upper lip in favor of a sensory explosion. The film does not just show us the 1920s; it asks us to feel the sun on a naked back, the dust on a library book, and the heavy, suffocating quiet of a house emptied by the Great War.



The narrative creates a mosaic of time, anchoring itself on a single, luminous day: March 30, 1924. Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), a maid with the soul of an observer, spends her day off with her secret lover, Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor). Paul is the sole surviving son of a local gentry family, his brothers lost to the trenches, and he is dutifully engaged to a woman of his own class.

Husson’s camera, guided by cinematographer Jamie Ramsay, stays intimately close to the lovers. The visual language here is not voyeuristic but immersive. When Jane and Paul are together, the world narrows to the texture of skin and the play of light. Yet, the tragedy is not their forbidden love—a trope we have seen a thousand times—but the encroaching void that surrounds them. The Niven and Sheringham families are not just grieving; they are hollowed out. Colin Firth and Olivia Colman, playing Jane’s employers, deliver performances of devastating restraint, portraying a generation so paralyzed by loss that they have become ghosts in their own drawing rooms.



The film’s most discussed sequence—and its thematic thesis—occurs after Paul leaves for a lunch he is dreading. Jane, left alone in his grand manor, wanders the halls entirely naked. This is not played for titillation; it is a radical act of occupation. As she runs her fingers over the spines of books in the library or eats the leftovers of a pie in the kitchen, she is shedding her invisibility as a servant.

In this sequence, Husson captures the precise moment of metamorphosis. Jane is no longer a maid, nor merely a lover; she is an explorer claiming a world that was never meant for her. It is here that the writer is born. The nudity emphasizes her vulnerability, yes, but also her raw, unadorned humanity against the backdrop of a class system that is stiff, clothed, and dying.



*Mothering Sunday* occasionally stumbles in its ambition, particularly in the flash-forwards to Jane’s later life, which can feel fragmentary and distracting compared to the hypnotic intensity of that single Sunday. However, the film succeeds powerfully as a meditation on how we survive trauma through creation.

By the time the credits roll, we understand that Jane’s writing is not just a career, but an act of defiance. In a world intent on silence and decorum, she chooses to speak. Husson has crafted a film that is as sad as it is sensual, reminding us that while grief may be the architecture of this era, art is the only way to open a window.