The film also marks the first appearance of Academy Award winner Glenda Jackson in a theatrical release in over 30 years, having last appeared in King of the Wind (1990), as well as the penultimate film role of her lifetime. Mothering Sunday had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on 9 July 2021.
Plot
In 1924, Jane Fairchild is an orphan and maidservant who works for the wealthy Niven family. On Mothering Sunday, Jane is given the day off to spend as she likes. To her surprise, Paul Sheringham, the son of wealthy neighbours, invites her to spend the day with him at his family's house while his parents are out having lunch with the Nivens and the Hobday family.
Paul and Jane have been having a secret sexual affair for years, since Jane's arrival at the Nivens's estate. However, Paul is due to marry Emma Hobday. She had been unofficially engaged to his brother James Sheringham, who died in the Great War. Both Paul and Emma have mixed feelings about their engagement but feel obliged to marry nevertheless.
At the Sheringham estate, Jane and Paul have sex; afterwards Paul leaves to join his family and fiancée for lunch, for which he is running late. Jane, alone at the house, wanders around naked examining how the Sheringhams live, then eats and drinks before setting off on her bike.
In a time-shift to a later point in her life, Jane has become a writer and marries Donald, a philosopher whom she meets while working at a book shop. He asks her how she became a writer and she says there were three reasons: she lists her birth and the gift of a typewriter as two initiating incidents, but says she prefers to keep the third to herself.
The third incident was on that Mothering Sunday when Jane returned to the Niven estate from her tryst with Paul. Her employer Godfrey Niven gravely informs her that Paul died in a car crash on his way to the lunch. A shocked Jane hides her grief as Godfrey asks her to accompany him to Paul's home.
At the Sheringham estate, they are greeted by Ethel, the maid there who has returned early. After Godfrey breaks the news to her about Paul's death, he asks if there was anything such as a suicide note left behind in his room. Ethel tells them she has thoroughly cleaned and tidied up Paul's bedroom, but there was no note.
That evening, Clarrie Niven, who herself is grieving the loss of her own sons in the war, opens up to Jane about the day's tragic events. Knowing Jane is an orphan, she emotionally tells her, "How very lucky. To have been comprehensively bereaved at birth. You have absolutely nothing to lose." Unable to sleep that night, Jane begins writing in a journal.
In another time-shift to later in the marriage of Jane and Donald, Jane learns that Donald has an inoperable brain tumour. He tells her that his death will perhaps fuel her to write her best work and laments that he will be unable to read it. Before he dies, Donald begs Jane to tell him about the third incident, but she instead tells him she loves him.
Years later when she is an old woman, Jane is approached at her home by members of the press after she wins a prestigious literary award. She is unimpressed and tells them she has already won all the available literary prizes, and returns to her typewriter.
In September 2020, Sony Pictures Classics acquired distribution rights to the film for North and Latin America, Asia excluding Japan, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Turkey, airlines and ships.[9]
Mothering Sunday had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on 9 July 2021.[10] It had its US premiere at the Hamptons International Film Festival.[11] It was scheduled to be released in the United States on 19 November 2021, but that date was changed and it opened on March 25, 2022.[12]
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 77% based on 136 reviews, with an average rating of 7.0/10. The website's consensus reads, "Mothering Sunday works at a frustratingly chilly remove, but involving performances and solid overall craft mean it's rarely less than engaging."[13] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100, based on 30 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[14]
Writing for IndieWire, Kate Erbland called Mothering Sunday a "lush, aching period drama".[15] Though she wrote the film's timeline shifts can be disorienting, "the strength of the film's emotion and talented cast (Young is joined by a murderer's row of stars, including Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, and Emma D'Arcy) help ground it".[15]The Hollywood Reporter's Leslie Felperin praised the performances and said the film "delivers beautifully when it comes to evoking the deliciously painful throb of a secret affair", making it "one of the sexiest heterosexual period dramas in some time".[16] However, she said that the film's structure lacks "the wry, melancholy, and, above all, intensely literary interior voice of the book's protagonist".[16] Clarisse Loughrey of The Independent wrote, "While so much of Mothering Sunday focuses on how grief, or the lack of grief, shapes its characters, it comes to an oddly inconclusive end",[17] while A.O. Scott of The New York Times said the film "never conveys the intensity of erotic passion, the ardor of creative ambition or the agony of grief".[18]
