Review: A secret love infuses sensual, melancholic ‘Mothering Sunday’

“Mothering Sunday” is a prestige movie bathed in sunlight, fixated on the sensual but tinged with an unspoken darkness. Set on a gorgeous English day in 1924 — lived by a young woman with a secret and remembered by her years later as a writer in love — it’s an unhurried reverie that’s sometimes as wonderfully sustained as a fermata but also occasionally stifling due to filmmaker Eva Husson’s dedication to that tonal approach above all else. In its flush brevity, British writer Graham Swift’s 2016 novella intended to exult in the glory of a day marked by intensity of feeling, even as it also underscored the fragility in seizing joy amid so much pain: in this case, the lingering pall felt in so many English households after World War I nearly erased a generation of sons. The “Once upon a time” heard in the opening moments, the shots of empty rooms in a well-appointed manor, the searching power on star Odessa Young’s face as she appears to be looking out of a window, and Josh O’Connor’s soft voice recalling a pleasant childhood memory with his brothers are clues that we’re in for a mood piece as much as a story. The blithe sexual intimacy and half-teasing/half-confessional exchanges of this pair’s late-morning dalliance are rapturously lit by cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay and wonderfully realized by Young and O’Connor, whose chemistry reminds one of classic golden age of Hollywood couplings — just add copious nudity.