Watching: Vita and Virginia
Jul. 9th, 2019 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartVita and Virginia, Chanya Button's film of Eileen Atkins' 1992 play telling the story of Vita Sackville-West's affair with Virginia Woolf, should have been right up my street, but in fact it really didn't work for me. As so often happens with films adapted from plays, it felt very stagy, and none of the characters really convinced. This was partly because, for some reason Button had clearly decided that everyone should speak with the cut-glass vowels of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, which had the effect of utterly destroying any sense of realism and felt particularly jarring in contrast to the completely non-period-appropriate electronic soundtrack.
I also had huge problems with how young many of the actors were; Duncan Grant, as played by early-30s Adam Gillen, looked liked a schoolboy with a fake moustache, and Emerald Fennell was also at least a decade younger than she should have been as Vanessa Bell. The worst example of this was definitely Elizabeth Debicki, at 28, playing a rather insipid and ethereal Woolf, who was actually in her early 40s at the time of the affair with Sackville-West. Instead of being a decade older than her lover, this film's Woolf appears younger than Gemma Arterton's Vita, which may be part of the reason why it was hard to understand Vita's initial hero-worshipping obsession, though I also thought there was a definite absence of chemistry between the two leads. There were some nice outfits, but if you want to watch a biographical drama about historical lesbians, I recommend you save the cost of the cinema ticket and watch Gentleman Jack on iPlayer instead.
I also had huge problems with how young many of the actors were; Duncan Grant, as played by early-30s Adam Gillen, looked liked a schoolboy with a fake moustache, and Emerald Fennell was also at least a decade younger than she should have been as Vanessa Bell. The worst example of this was definitely Elizabeth Debicki, at 28, playing a rather insipid and ethereal Woolf, who was actually in her early 40s at the time of the affair with Sackville-West. Instead of being a decade older than her lover, this film's Woolf appears younger than Gemma Arterton's Vita, which may be part of the reason why it was hard to understand Vita's initial hero-worshipping obsession, though I also thought there was a definite absence of chemistry between the two leads. There were some nice outfits, but if you want to watch a biographical drama about historical lesbians, I recommend you save the cost of the cinema ticket and watch Gentleman Jack on iPlayer instead.
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Date: 2019-07-10 07:54 pm (UTC)