Vita and Virginia

The photography, the costumes, the sets, the hairstyles, ... it's truly a masterpiece! Otherwise, the film is excessively cold and intellectual, with an almost-platonic relationship between two female writers, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, in the late 20's, in an exuberant aristocratic environment. From the beginning to the end, I was honestly outside the film, without ever being able to absorb the atmosphere, because of an almost-permanent boredom. Even the gorgeous Gemma Arterton has managed to make myself asleep. Literally incredible!

With all the scathing reviews, Vita & Virginia still had me from beginning to end.

Its prose exudes seductive eloquence; call me a hopeless romantic but the picture as a whole is like a beautiful ballad or poetry. The synth-pop-esque score feels refreshing against the 1920s backdrop, it doesn't feel out of place; and the cinematography is sleek (I immediately developed a particular fondness towards Virginia's 'hallucinations'). When it comes to the love scenes: less is more, n'est-ce pas?

(Vita and Virginia) is carefully, delicately weaved and it's beautiful in every sense of the word. Rarely do I show this much affection towards a film I've only seen once; but this had me, it just did.

Don't let other reviews deter you from giving it a chance...all it really needs is the right audience.

The characters speak in cryptic tongues, and I just don't understand the story. Everything else is beautiful from the sets to the costumes. Too bad I just cannot connect with the main characters at all.

I have never in my life heard such a wrong music for a particular film. while the costumes, scenography and everything else is aiming to be realistic, historical, MUSIC is completely unrelated to any of that...it doesn't communicate in any way with the rest of the film. it makes it very hard to watch, creates distraction.

I have to admit, I am only borrowing or tweaking a title of another movie because it does fit quite perfectly here. I am not a scholar of either of the two real life figures portrayed here and could not tell you how much of what we see here supposedly happened exactly the way it is shown. Or close to the way it is shown I reckon.

Having said that, it seems to be another forbidden love situation. Extremely good acting and the mentioned setting make this a movie that some will love a lot. On the other hand, since the pacing is slow and the time period may not be to everyones taste, there may also be a lot of dislike to what is being served.

Vita and Virginia - as the title suggests the movie draws its power mostly from the interaction of these two characters - which is more than enough for me.