Sunday 5 July 2020

Vita & Virginia (2020) - Movie Review



I have a certain… weakness for what I’m tentatively going to call ‘writer porn’. Not written pornography, but rather media that writers indulge in the same way the layman indulges in pornography. Stories about writers, what inspires them, what it means to put words down on paper, the… ecstasy of creation, all to make this rather self-obsessed profession seem like a higher calling. Or, at the very least, to reassure other writers that they do indeed answer to a higher calling. As someone who is too verbose for his own good, there’s always gonna be part of me that finds a certain excitement from films of this nature. And this particular film is no exception.

But before getting into the deeper folds of the material, let’s get into the visual and aural craft first. Like how aggressively modern this bloody soundtrack is! I swear, half of it is sweeping orchestrals, and the other half sounds like trap trying to reverse-engineer chamber music; bit of a surprise coming from Isobel Waller-Bridge, who also composed for the cinematic wallpaper paste that is Emma., but an oddly fitting one. For a story all about decidedly modern perspectives on romance and sexuality, it makes more sense the further it goes on.

Then there’s the visuals, and it’s quite easy to feel hot under the collar just looking at this thing. No, not because of that. Carlos De Carvalho’s cinematography gets a lot of mileage out of the Roaring Twenties setting, and the effects work used to illustrate Virginia Woolf’s mental illness and how it affects her perception is quite poetic in its subtlety. To say nothing of how good Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki look on-screen as Vita and Virginia respectively; definitely helps wash the taste of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby out of my head in the latter case.

Alright, enough with the foreplay; time to get into the writing. Director Chanya Button and co-writer Eileen Atkins (the latter of whom previously adapted Virginia Woolf directly with Mrs Dalloway) fill the air between our actresses with musings on love, society, their respective marriages, the hypocritical treatment of homosexual men vs. homosexual women, and all manner of other things that just sparkle across the screen. But where the words gain real potency is in the letter correspondence between Vita and Virginia, with the direction replacing the physical distance the letters are delivered across with erotic proximity. They essentially make the act of writing seem like the sexiest thing they could be doing to each other… at first.

One of the things that tends to get forgotten among writers is that there are only so many words in a given language, and there’s no guarantee that any of them are capable of describing a specific… feeling. There is such a thing as feelings beyond words, something Virginia herself experiences in bed with Vita, describing it as “perfectly, indescribably physical”. So, it’s basically word porn, itself taken both figuratively and nigh-on literally, that also highlights the superficiality within that very idea. The notion that flowery prose isn’t the same as the… feeling two people share when together.

And in that, I find myself a bit… unsatisfied? Stuck with a case of writer blue balls, perhaps? Don’t get me wrong, this still scratches that itch that films like A Quiet Passion and The Man Who Invented Christmas got their claws into, but when all is said and done, the story itself isn’t particularly enthralling. The presentation on all fronts certainly is, but for a depiction of a real-life coupling, itself an inspiration for a legendary part of the queer literary canon with Orlando: A Biography, it’s all feels surface level. Unlike the aforementioned films, this doesn’t have the gratifying heft behind its words to make it feel genuinely vital, like it’s more than just articulate navel-gazers finding new ways to express what they believe to be an infinity between their ears. Not to say that this comes across quite that shallow, but it is still not as deep as it presents itself to be.

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