S.ECRET LOVE
Genre: Feminine-class melodrama
Direction: Eva Husson. Starring Odessa Young, Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Emma D’Arcy, Simon Shepherd, Caroline Harker, Patsy Ferran
Josh O’Connor and Odessa Young in “Secret Love” (photo Robert Viglasky Photography).
It is Mother’s Day (1924) and as the owners have been invited by friends for a lunch in the English countryside, the young maid Jane is free to join her secret lover, the wealthy law student Paul: she knows that the young man is destined for a marriage of convenience, but she does not imagine the joke that fate will play on both of them after he has left her alone in his house to reach his betrothed.
Yet what could have been a melodrama about the cruelty of chance and class differences becomes a reflection on the female gaze and the passion for writing (some flashbacks made us guess what the future of the young protagonist will be).
A scene from “Secret Love” (photo Robert Viglasky Photography).
Without particular intellectual explanations but only following the young woman who wanders naked around the house where she made love with Paul, as if she wanted to fix in her memory what she knows she cannot achieve.
Sometimes the story seems to get lost behind Jane’s wanderingat other times she anticipates what she will have to face later in the years, but always underlining the choice to be the architect of her future and to react to the pains that Chance and the First World War have spread with both hands.
For those who love period films and old England.
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