Odessa Young, Olivia Colman, Penelope Cruz at the Hamptons International Film Festival If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

Australian actress Odessa Young exhibits poise beyond her years. At 23, the star of Mothering Sunday, screened at the recent Hamptons International Film Festival, commanded a leather sofa at the Maidstone Inn in East Hampton, ready to promote her film. With her was her co-star Josh O’Connor, Emmy winner for his role as Prince Charles in The Crown. The two are a hot item in the movie, flirting, making love, unselfconsciously intimate, unclothed, under Eve Husson’s fine direction. The nudity, beside the point, was never mentioned. The actors instead raged on about who had the closer friendship with the elder star each adored, Colin Firth. Young was certain she was the one. O’Connor wisely let that rest.

The “mothering” of the title has to do with a day off, a family time in fact kept for their trysts. Young’s character, an orphan working as the well-to-do family’s housekeeper, has no family obligation, and as the bereaved mother (Olivia Colman in a small but memorable role) tells her; therefore, she would not, she says, experience loss; the opposite is true.

Colman stars in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, based on a story by Elena Ferrante. As in Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels beginning with My Brilliant Friend, dolls and lost girls make for a potent theme, upending the lives of distraught mothers. Many see a Best Actress Oscar nod for Colman’s meaty role as a narcissistic, academic, an off-putting woman, and not to judge too harshly, horrible mother. For the Best Actress Oscar, my money is on Penelope Cruz in Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers. A certainty for a Best International Film nomination, the movie may just make it to many Best lists. Voters should look to award Cruz too. A mother, and her director’s muse, she may be Spain’s Sophia Loren, as Almodovar sees her, but Cruz is not just another hot body and pretty face.