Lady Niven explains the sense of pain to the orphan in weeds. “Lucky you that you have no family, and therefore you have nothing to lose.” She thinks of giving her relief, she relies on common thinking. Lady Niven (Olivia Colman) is selfish, cynical, hardened. Talk as if suffering were a question of wealth, social class, power. We are in the spring of 1924 and the consequences of the Great War are still very much alive in the troubled English aristocracy, an indelible offense.
Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young) was abandoned by her mother shortly after birth. But she has learned to look after herself. She is a servant of the Niven family, especially appreciated by the landlord, the tender Godfrey (Colin Firth). But she is also Paul’s clandestine lover, heir to the Sheringham family, a neighbor of the estate and a long-time friend of the Niven. Jane and Paul met after leaving a fruit shop. Their hidden joy is crossed by mourning: the son of the Niven and Paul’s brothers, who have never returned from the trenches. Paul is on his way to a career as a lawyer, as family tradition dictates. In fact, he is more attentive to horse racing and art.
Jane loves Paul with a sincere love that is not tied only to the desire for redemption from humble origins. On Mother’s Day, the two meet in his mansion and seal their love under the sheets, in a splendid sentimental nudity that defines the communion of souls. He is a prisoner of social conventions, and he doesn’t even think about questioning them. Jane can never aspire to be close to him: she knows, she suffers, but she feels she can’t do anything about it. Moreover, the young man is close to a forced and unwanted marriage with the restless Emma Hobday.
Jane wants to make her dreams come true, a still indistinct literary vocation. She knows that love for Paul will bring her more torment than ecstasy. But she stays next to him until the last moment, accepting a condition of obvious inferiority. The future, in the years of maturity, will reserve her a bookseller’s job, the brief idyll with a philosopher from which she will derive new pain and an unexpected happiness before withdrawing into an industrious solitude and becoming a bestselling writer. In that capacity, she will win prizes and be acclaimed taking the face of Glenda Jacksonthe former British MP, two Oscars, now 86 years old.
Based on the novel Mothering Sunday of Graham Swift (2016), Secret love and thea beautiful transcription of a world in decline as well as of the poetics of Eva Husson: “A mixture of memory and reality”, as cinema is and as we would like our whole life to be, with delays, detailed descriptions, with withheld passions, anger in the face of social barriers, the strength of looks, the desire for emancipation and the power of literary transfiguration capable of overcoming death. There love storyalthough so engraved in Alice Birch’s screenplay, he is in reality alone a melodramatic pretext to tell the anxieties of a bloodless social class. The film moves forward in a chronological sense, with the help of flashbacks that explain the story and its characters. It touches on the exercise of style, cincischia in the first part, while Jane’s universe takes shape with her velvety contradictions. It rears up in the second, when the depth of psychology grows. Odessa Young is the adorable Cinderella, a messenger of love in a terrified era, locked in a golden solitude, nostalgic for a far-off dimension, catapulted into the furnace of the twentieth century. Josh O’Connor, interpreter of Prince Charles in the series The CrownColin Firth and Olivia Colman give her the counterpoint with class british.
SECRET LOVE by Eva Husson
(Great Britain, 2021, duration 104 ‘)
con Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor, Olivia Colman, Colin Firth, Glenda Jackson, Sope Dirisiu, Caroline Harker
Rating: *** 1/2 out of 5
In the halls
23 July 2022 | 08:18
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