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.
No comments:
Post a Comment