Vita & Virginia

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.

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!

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.

First, let me say I'd go see Gemma Arterton reading the phone book: she has the rare facility of being able to play period stories as well as contemporary ones. She's great as Gemma Bovery and the Duchess of Malfi. She's well supported by Isabella Rossellini as Lady Sackville who tries without success to call Vita back to reality.

Second, what quirk of casting gave us Elizabeth Debicky, not yet thirty, as Virginia Woolf who started her three-year relationship (1925-28) with Vita at age 43? She just can't carry off the part of a woman in early middle age, and what's more she has this irritating drawl/vocal fry that put me off for most of the picture. So if you wish to see this interesting story, be aware it's been handled before (Portrait of a Marriage, The Hours) and sometimes better.

The play on which this movie is based works well on stage. A couple of actors bring to life the letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. It's simple and effective. The flim also uses the letters as the basis of the script, but the screenplay hasn't converted the literary tone into something speakable. The result is a thick porridge of words that doesn't sound remotely like living language . Even the best performance -- and it really is excellent -- by Elizabeth Debecki as Mrs Woolf, can't escape from the impossible pretension of the stuff coming out of her character's mouth. The accents, too, even Debecki's, have clearly been tirelessly worked on and worked over: few people sound real or believeable. Less accomplished cast members (of whom there are several) haven't a hope.

The film as a whole is similarly stilted. In spite of occasional (and welcomely effective) poetic visual flourishes, the film is so freighted with the weight of period frocks, settings and props, that it never takes flight. Only Isobel Waller-Bridge's music, liberated from period accuracy, escapes the self-consciousness that paralyses other departments.

The worst aspect of this tedious movie is that it takes the Bloomsbury set at their own estimate. This one's a genius, that one's a rebel, she is daring, he is boring....Whatever their talents may or may not have been, they are presented, uncritically, as so wrapped up in themselves, so hopelessly removed, in their privilege bubble, from the daily grind of the society around them, that there's no reason at all to be interested in their self-regard and self-induced melodramas.

A very poor effort indeed.