Fans of Dirisu, who made such an impact in Netflix’s “His House,” and Colman, who makes an impact in everything she does, will feel similarly underwhelmed. Both are confined to small supporting roles with narrow range: They’re both tragic figures, there to put the “bitter” in Jane’s bittersweet tale. Colman, an expert in playing repressed upper-class maternal figures thanks to her role as Queen Elizabeth II on “The Crown,” can screw her mouth tight as tears well in her eyes with the best of them. But while her character’s suffering is sympathetic, it has nothing on the thrilling emotional complexity of her performance in “The Lost Daughter.”
And so, amid the thousand-yard stares and hands caressing elegantly bound books, two things stand out: Extended full-frontal nudity from Young and O’Connor—a.k.a. Prince Charles on “The Crown”—and the film’s ambitious nonlinear structure. To director Eva Husson’s credit, the story is never hard to follow. And “Mothering Sunday” is assembled in such a way that the significance of certain words and objects is revealed naturally over time, like rock formations revealed by the ebbing of the tide.
Husson’s kaleidoscopic approach also gives Jane a rich, palpable inner life. Without having to state these things directly, the film conveys Jane’s conflicting feelings about her years as a maid, and how reading became a way out that was both temporary (losing herself in a good adventure story) and permanent (quitting her job with the Nivens to work in a bookshop). Combined with a vivid color palette and poetic close-ups, the direction accomplishes what it sets out to do: Evoke Jane’s fictionalized memories as vividly as if they were the viewer’s own.
But the story—as harsh as it is to say this about a movie where many young men are dead and many more are still to die—somehow manages to be both weighty and inconsequential. Both Colman and O’Connor come to “Mothering Sunday” from a longer, more in-depth exploration of the familial consequences of stiff-upper-lip British manners. And although the film hits a variety of emotional notes as it flits across time and space, the events tied to these sensations too often revert to one-note tragedy. On an intuitive, sensual level, “Mothering Sunday” is intoxicating. As a story with plot and characters, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.
Now playing in select theaters.