Female Film Critics 24/375
The Wonder dramatizes a story set in an isolated community in famine-ravaged 1862 Ireland. British nurse Lib Wright arrives to investigate reports that eleven-year-old Anna has survived four months without eating. Pitting rationalism against unquestioned religious belief, the film illuminates the contrarian, resolute position of a patriarchal panel wielding power versus Wright’s unwavering, methodical analysis.
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Based on the novel by Emma Donoghue — and supposedly inspired by a true story — Sebastián Lelio’s moody, atmospheric The Wonder features a powerful lead performance by Florence Pugh. She stars as Lib Wright, an English nurse brought to the remote Irish countryside in the early 1860s to help determine the truth behind a girl’s claim that manna from heaven — not food — is what has kept her alive for several months.
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Loren King Emma Donoghue’s best known novel “Room” centered on a mother-child bond against a perilous world. Donoghue’s “The Wonder,” set in the 19th century, is also rich with themes of maternal connections and the resiliency of children despite the misguided intentions and outright treacheries of adults.
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The first half of the movie is a slow-burn, but the plot catches fire in the second act when science is pitted against religious beliefs in a contest of grieving mothers. Pugh gives a sober, determined performance as a young widow whose loss of a child in infancy causes her to self-medicate with opium as she tries to save another from self-sacrifice.
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What does a filmmaker do with a stunning novel that is more style than plot? If you’re the French director Eva Husson, you make a film that is your own style. She blessed Graham Swift’s brilliant and brief 2016 novel, Mothering Sunday, with her style, thus making the film as transcendent as the novel.
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Based on the same-named novel by Graham Swift, director Eva Husson’s lush, languid drama Mothering Sunday feels in some ways like the cinematic equivalent of reading another English writer’s work. Introspective, melancholy, and finely observed, it’s reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse in the way it hones its focus on a very specific set of events and the way those events affect the people at the center of them.
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Eva Huson’s steamy and feminist Mothering Sunday is an epic multi-chapter drama that begins in post-World War I England, in a lush and lavish rural enclave where well-to-do upper crusty families are suffering traumatic grief from the deaths of their sons in the war to end all wars. The film focuses its lens on the British class system, particularly on the stiff upper lip ways in which women are expected behave. The plot is sufficiently replete with intriguing complications that keep you engaged and entertained. It might seem a bit soapy, were it not for the authenticity of its concerns, as well as its profoundly well-written and beautifully performed characters. The film is a very welcome invitation to finely crafted, socially conscious escapism.
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Mourning and grief collide with steamy sexuality in the British film Mothering Sunday, a costume drama set in 1924 soon after World War I. The romance in question is an Upstairs, Downstairs situation between a fetching orphaned maid named Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young) and the surviving son of a well-off family. She works for the upper-class Niven clan and has been carrying on a secret affair for years with Paul Sheringham, the lone surviving son of a near-by clan (the Emmy-winning Josh O’Conner aka the young Prince Phillip on the TV series The Crown).
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A marriage of convenience proves inconvenient when Paul, a son of society, and Jane, a maid, fall in love against the rules of 1920s England. The tragic reality of postwar times, sons lost and promising futures destroyed, prominent families fake smile through another lunch together keeping up appearances. But, death and suffering are inescapable. Mothering Sunday is a story of love and loss through the decades.
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Part Bridgerton, part Downton Abbey, director Eva Husson’s steamy take on the Hawthorne Prize winning novella Mothering Sunday is equally lush and bleak as it examines love and loss in post WW1 England through the eyes of orphan, maid, and aspiring writer Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young).
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