When FilmInk joins British actor Josh O’Connor and French filmmaker Eva Husson in a chic space on The French Riviera, they’re on a high. The night before, they premiered their new film Mothering Sunday in Cannes to rave reviews.
Adapted from the 2016 novella by Graham Swift, this poignant period drama set in England six years after the end of the First World War is a richly evocative tale of love and loss, superbly marshalled by Husson, who is out of her comfort zone after her urban adolescent tale Bang Gang: A Modern Love Story and the Kurdish war film Girls Of The Sun.
Set on Mothering Sunday in 1924, O’Connor plays Paul Sheringham, a law student engaged to be married. But while his destiny is seemingly laid out in front of him, he is secretly embroiled in an affair with Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), a housemaid who works for friends of the family, the Nivens (Colin Firth, Olivia Colman). They all live in the same picture-postcard English country village, where many remain rocked by the losses suffered in the Great War years earlier.
The film’s shining star is Young, the Sydney-born actress who burst onto the international stage in 2015, in the Australian films The Daughter and Looking for Grace. Since then, she’s made her mark in American productions, including Assassination Nation and the much-admired Shirley.
Husson was left hugely impressed. “It’s only when I saw the first piecing together of the film that I understood the extent of her comprehension of the character. She had really given Jane an incredible evolution. Of course, it happens in the text, but it happens physically through the way Odessa carried herself.”
O’Connor, who is eight years older than the 24-year-old actress, felt immediately in synch with his co-star. “I think both of us felt this connection to that script. And to that love story. It’s amazing, she’s so young.” And yet in the film, she must play Jane in her later years too, when she finds her own voice as a writer. “She had exactly what… my experience of women writers is,” says Husson. “[A] very strange mix of being very centred, very curious, very abrasive, very funny, and very sensual.” You might also add ‘mature’ to that list. “The business doesn’t scare her,” nods Husson. “She’s extremely professional.”
The same can be said for O’Connor, who impressed in the prize-winning God’s Own Country and followed this with a stirring performance as Prince Charles in Netflix show The Crown. He sees all three characters as related. “They’re men dealing with trying to understand their place in the world, whether it’s Johnny Saxby [in God’s Own Country] as a young gay man in the farming community where he’s isolated and lonely; whether it’s Prince Charles, a man who’s waiting for his mother to die for his life to take meaning; or whether it’s Paul Sheringham, who’s lost is an entire generation of young men around him and has the weight of that [to deal with] and is marrying someone he doesn’t want to marry.”
While it’s intriguing that a quintessentially English film like Mothering Sunday is led by an Australian actress and a French director, their perspectives have clearly added another layer to a film that feels a little more unique than your standard period fare. “I just connected to the emotional side of things,” shrugs Husson, who immediately took to the script by Alice Birch (who previously adapted Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People into a sensational drama for the BBC with Paul Mescal and Daisy Edger-Jones).
Partly, Husson was inspired by her own feelings towards England. “Actually, one of the reasons I was so into making the movie visually was that I have this memory of a trip I took [in England]. I took a mobile home and we drove around for a week. It was Easter weekend, and it was a symphony of flowers. It was incredible. I had no idea, because there is this snobbery in France about England. ‘Why would you ever go there?’ We’re idiots!”
Certainly, it was a learning curve for Husson about English culture. Even the legendary theatre and film star Glenda Jackson, who plays Jane in scenes that flash towards the end of her life, was new to her. “I will be very honest, I didn’t know much about Glenda Jackson,” she admits. “But then I got less ignorant! And then I just realised she was a monster. A force of nature.”
Nonetheless, there was friction during one moment when Husson repeatedly got Jackson to shoot one scene. “It was Take 24 or something. And my incredible script-supervisor reported to me afterwards that she started screaming from the top of her lungs, ‘This woman is insane!’”
Adding to the film’s oh-so-English feel is the casting of two Oscar-winners, Colin Firth and Olivia Colman (who worked with O’Connor on The Crown). What does O’Connor feel that actors of Firth and Colman’s stature bring to a film like Mothering Sunday? “That’s a good question,” he ponders. “Class. And, well, their performances. They both came in and delivered these unbelievable scenes. I think there’s something about Colin Firth… he’s got such an amazing face for period pieces. He’s quietly brilliant. And there is just a sense of home about Colin Firth. I don’t know why. He’s of that world. He can inhabit that world and access that world so easily.”
As memorable as the moments with Firth and Colman are, it’s likely to be the love scenes that linger in the mind. While the film has copious amounts of nudity, with its two leads not shy about shedding their clothes, Husson handles the scenes with great sensitivity. “You have to understand that as a director that you should never impose nudity on any actors. They have to be comfortable with it and they have to be as comfortable as you are. I knew Josh seemed to be comfortable. It was confirmed when I met him, when we discussed it. And Odessa… was in the same kind of space.”
Yet behind the sexual yearning is something symbolic about the male-female dynamic. “What Eva was very conscious of… I’d say women were much more victimised in that period,” says O’Connor. “But it’s interesting that men – even though they’re the oppressors – have suffered from the patriarchy in different ways themselves. And so I think it’s a good observation that there was trauma on both sides.” Adds Husson, “At the end of the day, the patriarchy is an oppressive system that is extremely unhealthy for the whole of society. The truth is, by representing masculinity as having a need to go to war, supporting the whole system and themselves, you make human beings who are just crumbling.”
Mothering Sunday opens in cinemas on June 2, 2022