I have never in my life heard such a wrong music for a particular film. while the costumes, scenography and everything else is aiming to be realistic, historical, MUSIC is completely unrelated to any of that...it doesn't communicate in any way with the rest of the film. it makes it very hard to watch, creates distraction.
I have to admit, I am only borrowing or tweaking a title of another movie because it does fit quite perfectly here. I am not a scholar of either of the two real life figures portrayed here and could not tell you how much of what we see here supposedly happened exactly the way it is shown. Or close to the way it is shown I reckon.
Having said that, it seems to be another forbidden love situation. Extremely good acting and the mentioned setting make this a movie that some will love a lot. On the other hand, since the pacing is slow and the time period may not be to everyones taste, there may also be a lot of dislike to what is being served.
Vita and Virginia - as the title suggests the movie draws its power mostly from the interaction of these two characters - which is more than enough for me.
The photography, the costumes, the sets, the hairstyles, ... it's truly a masterpiece! Otherwise, the film is excessively cold and intellectual, with an almost-platonic relationship between two female writers,
Vita Sackville-Westand
Virginia Woolf, in the late 20's, in an exuberant aristocratic environment. From the beginning to the end, I was honestly outside the film, without ever being able to absorb the atmosphere, because of an almost-permanent boredom. Even the gorgeous
Gemma Artertonhas managed to make myself asleep. Literally incredible!
While the production can't be faltered, and even Virginia Woolf is impersonated quite well, there is a dramatic hole to this which is common with biographical films.
The events and the nature of the people should be more involving, more genuinely dramatic, and yet it is like the reflective scenes from a Chekhov play; somber and infected with a sense of its own importance. It doesn't make the time vivid, so much as refract the events through a literary effort. The result is tedious which is not helped by the intellectual mannerisms.
A good example here is the dullness of the Woolf circle as portrayed whereas in real life they were lively, highly sexual and amusing, amusing to the point of exhaustion. In this film they are dour; sure, we are told they are all licentious and amoral, but what we see on screen is not that.
Woolf was wickedly funny and witty. Sackville-West was verbally dexterous too. It's absent here. They are earnest and plain, and Woolf would not have tolerated that.
The outcome of this love affair is the book, 'Orlando', which if someone hasn't read it, seems a curious object. This, in a way, says much about the film, in that it is a paean to a much adored book.
Novelists, and the business of writing, are not always a success in films. Painters and musicians do better because they are more social arts, but the thrill of writing and words are, paradoxically, not easy to transmit.
The book which emerged from the affair has some prestige, though, for its ardent fans, it's best to avoid Nabokov's assessment of it: he described Orlando as pretentious, bourgeois, nonsense; a view in part, which has tended to loom over Woolf's entire body of work. Nabokov's insight may well apply to this film too. Well, Woolf was very sharp at criticism too.
With all the scathing reviews, Vita & Virginia still had me from beginning to end.
Its prose exudes seductive eloquence; call me a hopeless romantic but the picture as a whole is like a beautiful ballad or poetry. The synth-pop-esque score feels refreshing against the 1920s backdrop, it doesn't feel out of place; and the cinematography is sleek (I immediately developed a particular fondness towards Virginia's 'hallucinations'). When it comes to the love scenes: less is more, n'est-ce pas?
(Vita and Virginia) is carefully, delicately weaved and it's beautiful in every sense of the word. Rarely do I show this much affection towards a film I've only seen once; but this had me, it just did.
Don't let other reviews deter you from giving it a chance...all it really needs is the right audience.
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What is the Japanese language plot outline for Vita & Virginia (2018)?
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