Mother's Sunday is the fourth Sunday of Lent. The festivity in which Mother's Day is celebrated in United Kingdom . Traditionally, in the British country that day, called Mothering Sunday, it was a day when manor-house maids were allowed off to join their respective families. On that day the story of Spring in Beechwood (theatrical release February 18), adaptation of the novel Graham Swift of 2016 which was titled, precisely, Mothering Sunday.
About his novel, Swift, one of the great modern writers, explained a few years ago: “There are days that contain a whole life.” Days when your life changes forever. The story is about that day.
“We all have a day that marks us, that will be linked to our lives, that which is the seed of our future... One of the mysteries of life, its very essence. You can rarely show the inside of one because you almost always get trapped inside; the role of fiction is to end up uncovering those hidden lives”.
You wish they were your parents.
The protagonist of Spring in Beechwood is called Jane (Odessa Young) a young servant girl in a good house in the English country, the Nivens (Colin Firth Y Olivia Coleman, difficult to imagine a better couple today, with her you can do a great double session with La daughter dark).
We are in 1924. The First World War left the families of this England rural broken, many young people lost, as happens to the Nivens, who lost their two children. Between their best friends, the Sheringhams and the Hobdays, they had only two left alive: Paul (Josh O'Connor) Y Emma (Emma D'Arcy), whom they have engaged in a kind of friendly marriage of convenience.
Paul agrees to do his duty, although he stretches the commitment, because, in reality, he is in love with Jane, with whom he has been having a passionate affair for years. On that Sunday in question, the lovers meet at his house, liberated, naked. It is his farewell. Warm and dramatic.
The Beechwood Lovers.
That day is where Jane places hers “Once upon a time”. The origin of her life as a writer, which is the true center of the story. We see two more stages of her life: in the 1940s, when she started writing, and in the 1980s (played by Glenda Jackson) when she has already succeeded as a writer and remembers her life.
The film is a reflection on memory (and lost love, loss in general). That cracked and idyllic memory with which we rewrite our lives. That's why the director's camera Eve Husson it is warm and intimate. And they had to juggle the rainy, gray fall of 2020 in which they filmed to go through a hot and bright spring.
Spring in Beechwood.
The novel was set in Henley-on-Thames, a pleasant little town in the county of Oxfordshire, known for the summer regatta. However, the movie was shot not far from there in Hambleden, a small town in Buckinhamshire, with a very aristocratic past, which made it easy for them to find beautiful stone country houses and red roofs for their stately families. A town that they filled with flowers to place it in spring and give it the color of that first love that is never forgotten. That day that sums up and changes a whole life.