Mothers' Sunday is a long-asleep holiday when servants were given time off to go home to their families.
Jane Fairchild is the maid of Nivens, a rich but sadly paralyzed family.
She is orphaned and has no one to go home to on her free Sunday.
Instead, she spends the day in bed with the youngest son on the nearest estate: Paul, whose marriage to a woman of good birth is imminent.
The naked hours with Jane are the end of a long and very secret love story.
It is shortly after the First World War
and a whole lot of sons, brothers and fathers have been swept along.
Paul is the only surviving son in the family, the grief hangs like a fog over the parent generation.
The young lovers steal joy secretly and not without a guilty conscience.
They giggle and enjoy each other's bodies, well aware that their cross - class history will soon be over.
Odessa Young and Josh O'Connor in the lead roles make Mothering Sunday unforgettable.
Their chemistry is magnetic, the sex scenes are downright damn lovely.
Feverish and joyful sex that immediately makes me think of the film adaptation of Normal People.
Screenwriter Alice Birch is the common denominator, but it is above all the direction and Odessa Young's lovely temperament that make it both fun and sexy.
The camera looks closely at bodies and things subjectively: a lip and a half cheek can take up the whole picture.
Photographer Jamie Ramsay puts the periphery at the center and upsets the perspective only slightly.
The bodies are also liberated from contemporary perfection, that a pair of fluffy unshaven female legs and well-grown pubic hair should be so unusual!
Jane's intelligence and energy
could carry the entire film, and Odessa Young does her best.
As a young woman, she is alternately gawky and servile, confused and determined.
As a middle-aged woman, she plays an equally credible intellectual writer, scarred by life but again in an interesting relationship, then with a philosopher without innate privileges (Sope Dirisu).
It would be completely cast if not a smeared filter of costume drama was applied to all the beautiful and raw.
Annoying string music forces the story into the sentimental and a couple of narrator's bends, which probably work well in the literary model, just become pillary.
It is about at least a schedule for too much and a prologue with heavy symbolism that is linked to an epilogue.
Nice as an idea, but in the end an annoying outside influence that rather overturns than helps the well-played and sensitively directed scenes that vibrate from here and now, sadness and lust.
Mothering Sunday has several scenes
that floor me completely, and it's not just eroticism.
Olivia Colman has a withdrawn role as the grief-stricken wife in the house, but once she speaks, time stops.
Her gentle husband (Colin Firth) anxiously tries to keep the family together despite the couple being deprived of the younger generation and thus their future.
Mothering Sunday is best seen as a string of transformative scenes and by trying to ignore the lavish and sentimental costume that tries to envelop them.