Vita & Virginia

Greetings again from the darkness. The historical landscape of relationships is littered with the remains of artist couples who began with a cosmic connection and ended with a sonic boom. Add in the socially toxic matter of same-sex attraction from a century ago, and you have a starting point for the romance-friendship-inspiration between writers Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Director Chanya Button co-wrote the script with Eileen Atkins, and it's adapted from Ms. Atkins play and the personal letters of Virginia and Vita ... correspondence that covered many years and hundreds of letters.

Gemma Arterton (TAMARA DREWE, 2010 and QUANTUM OF SOLACE, 2008) stars as writer Vita Sackville-West, a successful poet, novelist, and columnist. Vita was also known for her free spirited ways, and sometimes scandalous behavior. Virginia Woolf is played by Elizabeth Debicki ("The Night Manager", THE GREAT GATSBY), and she does really nice work capturing the troubled genius, and the glimmers of hope during her time with Vita. The two women were so very different in their approach to life and writing, although each faced their own challenges.

We see their first meeting, and the immediate enchantment that occurs as their eyes meet across the room. However, what makes their relationship interesting is the long and winding path to consummation. The interesting parts come as Vita toys with the fragile Virginia, though it's clear their connection is quite strong. Though the connection was strong, the relationship was quite complex. Vita was a fan of Virginia's talent. Virginia was an admirer of Vita's strength and confidence. They seemed to push each other - sometimes for the better, other times for the worse.

The film opens as Ms. Woolf's book "Jacob's Room" is being typeset and printed. It's quite an artistic way to show the mechanics of the process, and credit goes to Cinematographer Carlos De Carvalho for a segment that would typically be little more than filler. We learn about Vita's secretly "open" marriage to diplomat Harold Nicholson (Rupert Penry-Jones) and her constant battle with her mother Lady Sackville (Isabella Rossellini) over scandals and the family reputation. Virginia's husband Leonard (Peter Ferdinando) runs their printing business, and is seen as vital to his wife's emotional stability, despite the void in other marital aspects. Virginia's artist sister Vanessa Bell (Emerald Fennell) is quite an interesting character whose backstory (also a part of the Bloomsbury Group) is teased enough that she might deserve her own film.

The film features a couple of memorable lines of dialogue, both spoken by Vita. During a BBC radio program she boldly claims "Independence has no sex", and in an early discussion with Virginia states "Popularity is no sign of genius". Vita's brazen step traveling as a man with her previous lover Violet Keppel is mentioned, but mostly this is focused on the class differences and the 'snatched moments' for Vita and Virginia. Vita's exotic spirit and Virginia's struggle with mental health are made clear (even using special effects for the latter). "Visions" of conversations bring the words on the letter pages to life, though it does seem that the filmmakers played things a bit too safe in order to capture a mainstream audience. The music of Isobel Waller-Bridge (Phoebe's sister) brings a contemporary feel but it's at times in contrast to the high gloss presentation. For the women who wrote and inspired the amazing novel "Orlando", and led one of the more tumultuous historical lesbian affairs, it could be argued that they deserved a bit more risk taking on the big screen. Still, "X" marks the spot for Virginia's writing room, and we do understand why discretion might be the right call.

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!

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 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.

2018 saw several historical dramas about lesbianism, including the fictitious "Tell It to the Bees" and three about real historical figures, even if doubts have sometimes been expressed about their historical accuracy. "The Favourite" dealt with the triangular relationship between Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham, and "Colette" told the story of the bisexual French novelist of that name. "Vita & Virginia" is about two more bisexual literary figures, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.

As the story opens, in the England of the 1920s, Vita and Virginia are both well-known writers, but do not know each other personally because they move in different social circles. Vita is a politically and socially conservative aristocrat, whereas Virginia is part of the liberal, progressive Bloomsbury Group. Now that Virginia Woolf has become such a well-established part of the canon of English Literature ("From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf"), it seems strange to think that during their lifetimes it was Vita Sackville-West who was regarded as the more significant writer, both in terms of book sales and in terms of critical acclaim.

Vita, however, is fascinated by the other woman's work, and is determined to make her acquaintance. The two women, as portrayed here by Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki, are very different in personality. Debicki's Virginia is shy and retiring, and physically and mentally frail, whereas Arterton's Vita is outgoing, lively and magnetic. (Was Vita's vitality, I wonder, the reason for her nickname? She was officially baptised Victoria Mary, but was always known as Vita, Latin for "life"). When the two meet, however, they quickly become friends, despite their differences, and eventually lovers. Her relationship with Vita inspires Virginia's "Orlando", one of her best-known novels and her first major popular success.

One criticism that has been made is that Debicki is too young for the role of Virginia, and there is some justice in this. Virginia she was the older of the women by eight years, but Debicki is four years younger than Arterton. At least, however, she doesn't rely upon a false nose like Nicole Kidman did when playing Virginia in "The Hours".

Both women were married, and their husbands play important, if subsidiary, roles in this drama. Vita had a famously open marriage to the diplomat Harold Nicolson, who was himself bisexual and had relationships with other men. In the film he is depicted as having no objection to his wife's lesbian friendships, although he does wish she could be more discreet about them. (Her previous affair with Violet Trefusis caused a scandal which damaged his career). Virginia's publisher husband Leonard is not enthusiastic about her relationship but feels it is for the best if he tolerates it, given her fragile mental state.

Some may think that the film is too passionless, a presentation of a well-mannered, drawing-room form of lesbianism. Again, there might be some justice in this, although I suspect that such criticisms are most likely to come from those who expected, and hoped, that the film would be more sensual and erotic than it actually is. The film was never intended to be a piece of erotica, and I think that there are reasons why it is less passionate than one might expect. In the first place, it deals with events which took place nearly a hundred years ago, a period when the British still believed in the idea of the "stiff upper lip", far more than they do today. As a result people tended to behave in a more restrained manner, at least in public; open displays of strong feelings were discouraged. This was especially true when those feelings existed between two women; although lesbianism, unlike male homosexuality, was never illegal in Britain, it was still the subject of great social disapproval.

Secondly, in the version of events put forward here, Vita has had several earlier affairs with other women, whereas this is Virginia's first lesbian relationship. Debicki plays her not as a woman in the throes of a grand passion but as someone rather uncertainly exploring and discovering new aspects of her sexuality. The result is a film which is certainly restrained, but this seems appropriate to its period and to its subject-matter. It is, in fact, the restraint with which writer-director Chanya Button and her co-writer Eileen Atkins bring to their story which enables them to explore the psychology of their two main characters in such depth. 7/10