Review: Chanya Button's 'Vita and Virginia'
by Philippa Somerset
A week ago, I went to watch Chanya Button’s Vita and Virginia, a biographical film about the affair between novelists Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. It was a film I had been anticipating since I had heard early mentions of it being made, and seemed almost inevitably my dream film: a costume drama, led by women, with a brilliant cast of actors I adore, and focusing on the relationship between these two women that I had been reading about, almost obsessively, for years. I so, so wanted to love it. I saw it twice (having waited for it to arrive at the wonderful Broadway Cinema in Nottingham), and am still trying to decide how I truly feel about it.
a confusing experience
I’m still trying to absorb it. It felt so odd, intrusive, illusionary to see this (beautiful, though wrongly and overly beautified in many ways) image of these people — I’ve spent so many hours considering them, thinking of them, imagining, evoking. It was so incredibly intense and overwhelming, even watching the trailer seemed to shake me in a certain way. Suddenly immersed in this story I felt as if I was being held up, my excitement at first blurring the flaws and mis-steppings I saw later upon a second watching.
I hadn’t expected many of the odd stylistic choices. Isobel Waller-Bridge’s synth-pop score, of which I had known about and had been a little tentative of initially, worked perfectly, somehow jarring, just enough to shock without overpowering the speech and images that it framed, however many of the other choices seemed to me unnecessary.
I slightly detested the use of special effects — plants growing whimsically out of floorboards and birds swooping low and with gusto — all from within Virginia’s mind. I wish that we could keep a kind of calm, gentle purity about our films, I think they’d feel more cohesive, more honest. It seems somewhat of a trend now to subvert the period drama in this kind of vague, abstractly modern way, and I think it tends only to take away from the set and the actors, the parts that do seem more rooted in reality. I’d much rather a film be beautifully, creatively shot, than rely on these awkward additions. Carol, for example, is such an exquisitely perfect film, I think, because it allows for simplicity within its intensity. No one can ever truly understand Virginia Woolf’s mind, so why make this false attempt, filling in the unknowns with these... hallucinations? Imaginings? There can be so much more power had in allowing the actor to simply act, in letting audiences create their own interpretation of the interior aspects, in trusting them to. It seemed intrusive to try and understand Woolf in this way — I feel strongly that in reading so much about these people and creating my own concept of them, I must always hold a respect for them, the memory of them. This should be just as true, if not more so, in the creation of a film formed around these words.
an overwhelming intensity
I have thought for so long now that Vita would adore it all: the books of letters and photographs, the biographies, and so on. She always desired to be known, her aristocratic upbringing making her predisposed to adore the attention and notoriety that she found. Though, despite this, the adaptations, imitations of her life on screen seem to me almost a disrespect, inevitably reduced in their being a reproduction. A step to far maybe, or perhaps I dislike the imposition of the actor (as brilliant as they may be), and this characterisation, onto the true life and story of someone who somehow feels so intimate.
With Virginia I am constantly, cautiously aware of how we want to perceive her overlapping and encroaching on her reality, a result often of the romanticisation of her illness. The obsession we have with her mental instability and suicide is always at risk of overshadowing her life and writing. It seemed to me that the film walked very precariously along this line; in moments the discussion of death seemed honest and frank, at other times the motif of water seemed to fall very much into that assumed image of Woolf.
The intensity with which I envisage these people is overwhelming. In moments, more than once, I’ve felt a great sadness, a regret at never being able to know them, to share a room with them, to live in a time that was alongside them. It seems childishly melodramatic, but It’s an almost grief-like encasement with which this falls on me, as I remain most of the time stubbornly unwilling to accept the reality of their place as firmly in the past. Aware as I am of their flaws, their snobbery, the disparity between my own working class upbringing and their lives — lived in an entirely different world, both socially and historically — I cannot help but cling to them. Words can connect with us in a way film never can. Words and pictures, set and static, may require an added imagination, a fantasy of sorts, but it becomes true to us in our having created our own individual and interior concept, and film will forever be another’s imitation, unable to sit truly comfortably beside that of our own mind.
Philippa Somerset is a sixth form student currently studying Fine Art, English and Maths at A-Level.
In her spare time she enjoys reading, writing about books and film, and a good charity shop. More of her writing can be found on her blog.