First Take: When the nudity becomes distracting

While watching Eva Huson’s Mothering Sunday, I was reminded of a conversation I had with Gulzar Saab on love-making on screen.

He said, and I quote, “True love-making is when the actors on screen and the audience forget about the naked bodies.”

With such distinguished British actors as Colin Firth, Olivia Coleman, Josh O’Connor and the legendary Glenda Jackson in the cast, one would be within one’s right to expect a feast of performing excellence.

And Mothering Sunday is just that. But there is a problem. Odessa Young and Josh O’Connor, who play the romantic lead, are naked for a large part of the plot. I don’t know about others. But for me, it becomes difficult to focus on the narrative when the characters are seen walking around with nothing on except the radio and perhaps the perfume.

And it’s not as if they need to be naked for so long. Odessa Young, an Australian actress playing Jane, a housekeeper at a British aristocratic couple’s mansion in the 1920, is locked in secret liaison with the uppperclass Paul, played by Josh O’Connor, to whom playing British aristocracy comes easily ever since he played Prince Charles in The Crown. Here he is all coy smiles and all-knowing looks as he holes up for the afternoon in his family mansion with Jane.

They make love and of course the clothes go. Naturally.

Elsewhere, Paul’s parents, his sultry fiancée and Jane’s employers are waiting over lunch for Paul while he is having sinewy sex with the maid who gives an all-new definition to the concept of room service.

Then a tragedy occurs to spoil the idyllic reverie of the afternoon. I didn’t feel even a jot of shock, let alone grief for these people who look like they have embalmed their grief in tons of Botox from long before Botox was invented.

The question I found myself asking is, why did such talented actors decide to be part of something so slight? Like a beam of light in a sprawling stretch of barren land, Mothering Sunday is a selfimportant document on the decadent aristocracy wrestling with its own relevance.

The film is directed by the fiery Eva Huson. Her previous two features Bang Bang and Girls of The Sun set the screen ablaze with their passionate storytelling. Mothering Sunday feels strangely sterile, denuded of all passion. Even the lovemaking scenes, so central to the story seem sapped of synergy. Maybe the British aristocracy in the 1920s just after World War 1 when the British were adrift in selfdoubt, likes it passion more decorous than kosher.

It is sad to see two of British cinema’s finest actors, Olivia Coleman and Colin Firth, playing an arid aristocratic couple. They don’t only seem to despise one another, they also seem disdainful of the languorous lifestyle that they are trapped in.

The fact that director Eva Huson shows no regard for a chronological timeline adds a pretentious layer of anarchy in a script already stripped of a centre. One portion of the narrative shows Jane as an aspiring writer in love with a philosopher named Donald who is played by a Black actor named Sope Dirisu.

Since it is most unlikely that a Black man in those days would be able to break so many levels of class and cultural barriers in the 1920s, I guess this a case of colour-blind casting.Mothering Sunday wants to get to the core of the human relationships that it so seems to value. But it just doesn’t seem to go beyond the skin.

What is wrong with Paul Verhoeven, who once upon a time made clenched actioners like RoboCop and Total Recall? Then he discovered the pleasures of forbidden sex in Basic Instinct and the disastrous Showgirls. His last film Elle in 2016 had Isabelle Huppert actually enjoying rape.

I thought the virulent voyeurism of Verhoeven couldn’t get worse. In Benedetta, he proves me wrong. Set in the 17th century—so no vibrators and other stimulants—the deeply offensive film is one long marathon of naked breasts and simulated vaginas set in a Catholic convent where the nuns seem to be hornier than sex workers in a brothel. They rub each other and themselves. They even get turned on defecating together.

There is a sequence where we actually see the two heroines, Benedetta (Virginie Efira) and Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia) defecating together. Benedetta even offers her new friend some dry grass after the act. It’s all supposed to be extremely erotic. But comes across as acutely idiotic, with the nuns flashing their breasts out of habit(pun intended). The loose film is based loosely on the 1986 novel Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith Brown and purports to package the acts of rebellion in an oppressive convent where sexual frustration runs rampant.

So does the director’s imagination ,which is borderline prurient. The nudity and lovemaking are intended to be casually seductive, Instead they are offensively violent and misrepresented. The nudity is downright gratuitous, with the nuns slipping out of their habits with the expertise of women who do such things for financial rather than emotional satisfaction.

The two young actresses do well for themselves whenever the script allows them to get out bed. The last 20 minutes of the perverse proceedings when the politics of religion faces a vaginal protest are specially mortifying and forged. The violence on the streets as the evil cleric (Lambert Wilson) is mob-lynched is so hellishly gratuitous it makes you wonder why Verhoeven is still directing films at 83.

The stunning merger of body and soul in Ammonite is ample proof that nudity needn’t be a distraction. Director Francis Lee made his debut in 2017 with the masterpiece on gay love God’s Own Country. In Ammonite he moved back into the same familiar territory of forbidden love in the midst of a cruelly stoic desolate countryside. This time Lee has shot his lesbian love story in Lyme Regis, where Meryl Streep was captured in stunning glory in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 30 years ago.

Ammonite is as accomplished a work as the director’s God’s Own Country. There is plenty of graphic sex between the two protagonists who go completely nude for their characters, emotionally and physically. Just as Josh O’Connor and Alec Secăreanu did in the earlier film. The latter is back in Ammonite as a physician with an indeterminate foreign accent who is attracted to Winslet. Who wouldn’t be?! But she has has the hots for the beauteous Ms Ronan who reciprocates with abundant enthusiasm.

Kate Winslet plays British paleontology Mary Anning in the 1840s. As played by Winslet, Mary is a woman who has shut out all emotions. Winslet reminded me of Shabana Azmi in Deepa Mehta’s Fire. Mary has an old demanding mother (the wonderful veteran Gemma Jones) and she has no time or inclination to indulge her heart…until the ailing frail Charlotte(Saoirse Ronan) walks into her life with a husband Roderick (played by James McArdle, who has one of the best speaking voices I’ve heard in a British actor) .

Roderick is (conveniently) a bit of a jerk. When she tries to make love to him (after watching him wear his birthday suit) he gently rebukes her, “I don’t think we should try for another so soon after.” In other words, Charlotte has had a miscarriage and her husband thinks sex is to make babies. Also, again conveniently, he drops out of the narrative like a hot potato once his wife is in Mary’s bed. After Mary and Charlotte are separated Mary’s mother, again most conveniently, drops dead, so she can rush to London to be reunited with Charlotte.

The chemistry between Ronan and Winslet is so indisputably authentic, I stopped looking at the bodies and went right to the soul.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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