Vita and 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.

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.

While the production can't be faltered, and even Virginia Woolf is impersonated quite well, there is a dramatic hole to this which is common with biographical films.

The events and the nature of the people should be more involving, more genuinely dramatic, and yet it is like the reflective scenes from a Chekhov play; somber and infected with a sense of its own importance. It doesn't make the time vivid, so much as refract the events through a literary effort. The result is tedious which is not helped by the intellectual mannerisms.

A good example here is the dullness of the Woolf circle as portrayed whereas in real life they were lively, highly sexual and amusing, amusing to the point of exhaustion. In this film they are dour; sure, we are told they are all licentious and amoral, but what we see on screen is not that.

Woolf was wickedly funny and witty. Sackville-West was verbally dexterous too. It's absent here. They are earnest and plain, and Woolf would not have tolerated that.

The outcome of this love affair is the book, 'Orlando', which if someone hasn't read it, seems a curious object. This, in a way, says much about the film, in that it is a paean to a much adored book.

Novelists, and the business of writing, are not always a success in films. Painters and musicians do better because they are more social arts, but the thrill of writing and words are, paradoxically, not easy to transmit.

The book which emerged from the affair has some prestige, though, for its ardent fans, it's best to avoid Nabokov's assessment of it: he described Orlando as pretentious, bourgeois, nonsense; a view in part, which has tended to loom over Woolf's entire body of work. Nabokov's insight may well apply to this film too. Well, Woolf was very sharp at criticism too.

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!

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.