Female Film Critics 24/375
Ian Fleming — yes, that Ian Fleming — narrates Operation Mincemeat: “In any story,” he writes, “there is that which is seen and that which is hidden.” Such is the case with Operation Mincemeat and the fascinating — and flawed — film based on the true event. The time is July 1943 during World War II. The place is England; the target is Sicily.
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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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“You’re not supposed to mourn someone while they’re still alive,” says Tusker (Stanley Tucci) in Supernova, a quietly powerful movie in which he and his longtime partner, Sam (Colin Firth), are doing just that. Tusker is suffering from early onset dementia and they both know that he doesn’t have long to remain himself. There’s a tenderness to their love that is so rare in movies – especially between two men – and it is a joy to watch. In fact, the world would probably be a better place if more moviemakers featured male characters with this depth of emotional intelligence.
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This past year’s shift to streaming has invited an increase in films that don’t need to wow with explosions, car chases, and superheroes battling villains on enormous screens. This has brought some superb, thoughtful character studies with emotional and psychological insights. Writer/director Harry Macqueen’s Supernova falls into that category with moments of heartrending emotion.
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British director Mark Munden’s new adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved 1911 fable is adapted by Jack Thorne who – with cinematographer Lol Crawley – leans heavily on eye-popping magical realism. Appealing to youngsters who have been trapped in isolation for many months because of Covid-19, the theme of the wondrous fable is surprisingly timely.
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