MOTHERING SUNDAY is an exquisite costume drama even though the two leads wear nothing at all for a major portion of the picture.

Just as well it is set mostly on a warm spring day in 1924, where house maid and foundling Jane Fairchild, played by the luminous Odessa Young, finds she has the rare chance to spend quality time with her secret lover, Paul, a rakish Josh O’Connor, the boy from the manor house nearby who is Jane’s long-term love despite the fact that he’s engaged to be married to another woman, a childhood friend and daughter of his parents’ friends.

As Jane frolics with Paul, her employers, Mr and Mrs Niven (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman), are attending a luncheon with Paul’s parents and intended in laws. The Nivens are a couple devastated by the loss of sons in the Great War; she a cauldron of simmering sorrow, he a disciple of the stiff upper lip. Heartbreaking characters played with palpably heartbreaking performances.

It’s all breeding and birth that counted with this kind, never mind to what actual purpose. Nevertheless, the whole world was in mourning all around them.

Screenwriter Alice Birch has done a superb job adapting Graham Swift’s sublime novel, adopting it’s languorous rhythm and tone to great dramatic effect and director Eva Husson gives it cinematic polish and finesse.

Jamie Ramsay cinematography plays with light to dapple their dishabille, the sunshine and the shadows from the latticework in the windows slipping over the lovers like foliage.

Production design by Helen Scott evokes the time between the wars with elegance and charm.

Three time Oscar winning costume designer Sandy Powell could quite easily win her fourth with a wondrous wardrobe bespoke and befitting of the narrative.

Avoiding the flippancy, shallowness and dissatisfaction of Downton Abbey, MOTHERING SUNDAY is bold, beautiful cinema, constantly surprising, joyously sensual, emotionally soaring and deeply affecting.