Film Review: Vita and Virginia

Deya Boyadzhieva reviews Vita and Virginia, a film by Chanya Button about the affair between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

As a chronic Virginia Woolf maniac, I was excited to watch the film based on her vehement romance with the socialite Vita Sackville-West. The true story of their polymorphous relationship is a homoerotic tale of two middle aged women who, in the early years of the 20th century, thrive in noncomformity. Vita explores her gender identity and perpetually scandalizes the 1920s beau monde, and Virginia is a pioneering modernist and feminist, “an experimentalist in humanity” in Vita’s words. They are both in open marriages - something that to this day remains a taboo in Western society. Their relationship spans across passionate intimacy and numerous letters, until it morphs into a lifelong friendship. One of the relationship’s side effects, as it certainly isn’t an end result, is what is described as, “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” namely the novel Orlando (1928). The film Vita and Virginia (2018) recreates the initial six years of the relationship that lead up to the creation of Orlando. Disappointingly, it sidesteps truth and exploits true romance to conform to popular demand. The result? A mediocre (at best) rendition of an extraordinary story.

I am inclined to support creative freedom in many cases, but this film falls short of any hint of artistry that could transcend the historical reality. At its centre is the alarming trope of the depressed genius (Elizabeth Debicki as Virginia Woolf), who is saved by a free-spirited soul (Gemma Arterton as Vita Sackville-West). While in real life Vita had major positive impact on Virginia, their relationship is based on mutual dependence. It is high time for modern cinema to let go of the martyr-saviour cliche wherein the entire ontology of the characters is reduced to these roles. Moreover, in reality, Vita is in her thirties and Virginia in her forties when their relationship unfolds. They are not the twenty-year olds depicted in the film. While homosexuality is increasingly given voice to in fiction, homosexual relationships with age-gaps between older people aren’t as represented. Expanding the voices of marginalised groups isn’t a priority here – the film doesn’t stay true to the real story.

With the running subplot of Woolf’s genius being concomitant with her ‘madness’, her emotions range from confusion to serious delusion. She even hallucinates colourful vegetation when she is around Vita, which is a facetious, questionable directing choice. Nonetheless, it works as the only hint beyond sterile declamations that Woolf actually has feelings for Vita. Sudden cosmic musings disembody Woolf from the setting and perpetuate a sense of lifelessness. All this results in a bad parody of a character straight out of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. The goal may be to celebrate Woolf’s genius (and why is this the goal of a movie about Vita too?), but in the end, it is all too camp to be taken seriously.

Arterton’s role as Vita is, for half the film, to fangirl over Woolf, and for the other half, to be the muse for her novel. She is reduced to an accessory that merely foregrounds and assists Woolf’s genius. She is portrayed as a happy-go-lucky bon vivant with either her mother (Isabella Rosellini), or her husband (Rupert Penry-Jones) occasionally disrupting her world of pleasure. Her character is significantly underdeveloped - two-dimensional, overarchingly trivial in comparison to the markedly out-of-this-world Virginia Woolf. They both express their love for one another by reciting original letters, face to the camera, trespassing fictional boundaries. This works as an agonizing twist to the “show, don’t tell” rule of thumb with the director’s decision to always tell and never show. And really, how can this ever work in a film? Both the Virginia and the Vita of Vita and Virginia come to the same end. They are rendered flat and lifeless, victims to an attempt to verbatim transliterate written word into cinema.

It may be me trying to grab onto anything remotely enjoyable, but by the end of the movie, I found a strange sense of appreciation for the soft electronic beats that are the backdrop to the 1920s setting. The witty anachronism of Virginia dancing to the beats in one scene can work as quite the detail elsewhere. The costume designer, Lorna Marie Mugan, has also done an exquisite job communicating the subtle rebelliousness and the characters’ personalities. The aesthetic quality of the scenes in general is not to be neglected, but it does not compensate for everything else that has gone wrong. The film is yet another writer’s biopic in which modern cinema refuses to portray reality, no matter how remarkable of itself, in the name of a set of tropes that are banal, but popular.