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the amorous genesis of a masterpiece


THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE

For her second feature film, the young British director Chanya Button aimed very high. Not only does she stage one of the most revered figures in XX century literaturee century, Virginia Woolf, but she claims to stage in the same movement a biographical episode and the creation of a work. It is true that the liaison between the author of Mrs Dalloway and Vita Sackville-West was born Orlando, novel that was to make Virginia Woolf famous. This high ambition was to cause some disappointments. It is not they that we retain from this sensual and cerebral film, but rather the beautiful couple that form Elizabeth Debicki and Gemma Arterton, and the abundance of ideas and discoveries that all want to free Vita & Virginia the weight of the British film tradition in costume.

Read also the interview with Chanya Button: “I wanted to make the feelings feel”

It’s 1922, Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki) has just published Mrs Dalloway. The screenplay (adapted from a play by Eileen Atkins) shows her struggling against depression, under the benevolent and anxious gaze of Leonard Woolf (Peter Ferdinando). Meanwhile, Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) tries to return to the good graces of Lady Sackville, her dragon mother (Isabella Rossellini, impressive in wickedness and meanness), after having fled husband and children in the company of a lover . Also a novelist, Vita Sackville-West wants to meet Virginia Woolf so that the aura of the avant-garde writer rubs off a bit on her reputation as an outrageous socialite.

Her husband Lady Sackville and Harold Nicolson (Rupert Penry-Jones) condemn these intellectual aspirations. The first because she had to keep silent about her own origins as a continental semi-socialite to find her place in the gentry, the second because a scandal could draw attention to her own homosexuality and endanger her diplomatic career.

Electro rhythms

For decades, British cinema has loved to rehash this interwar period and we feel that Chanya Button was animated by the fear that her film resembles the series Downton Abbey. To avoid this trap, she plays on the similarities between the environment that revolved around the circle of Bloomsbury, which included Virginia Woolf, and the avant-garde that flourished decades later around Carnaby Street or King’s Road. The boys of the Roaring Twenties take on the air of hippies or punks, and this golden youth (amidst which the fabulous fortune of the Sackvilles stands out clearly) dances on electro rhythms. Rather than reconstructing the soundtrack of the time, the director called on the musician Isobel Waller-Bridge (if the surname seems familiar, it is because she is the composer of the series Fleabag, and the author’s sister and interpreter, Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who offers an organic pulse, a sonic replica of the desires that arise between the two women.

Chanya Button uses digital special effects that transform London landscapes into jungle

The effect generated by these processes is attractive: even if it lacks the postapocalyptic aspect of the period (we are less than five years from the armistice of 1918), we perceive the desire for emancipation, both in everyday life only in creation. These two areas overlap when Vita Sackville-West sets out to inspire Virginia Woolf with the same passion she feels for the writer. In this game, Gemma Arterton is formidable, enterprising and egotistical, persevering and inconsistent. The character of Virginia Woolf is less easy to interpret (it took Nicole Kidman a false nose to get out of the case, in The Hours (2002), by Stephen Daldry). Elizabeth Debicki is moving, but she is forced to maintain large blurred areas in her painting of the novelist. To evoke the evil that sometimes prevents her from writing (and will eventually prevent her from living), Chanya Button uses digital special effects that transform London landscapes into jungle.

These hallucinations are less convincing than the recourse to the text of the correspondence that the two women exchanged, taken up literally by the actresses. These artfully crafted words, said with hypnotic sweetness, form a bridge between life and fiction that forms in the mind of Virginia Woolf. The genesis of the character of Orlando, an Elizabethan poet who became a woman before living for centuries, becomes clear at once, and the vision of the film by Chanya Button makes you want to reread the novel, to review the film by Sally Potter [Orlando, 1992], which revealed the breadth of Tilda Swinton’s talent.

British film by Chanya Button. With Elizabeth Debicki, Gemma Arterton, Isabella Rossellini, Rupert Penry-Jones, Peter Ferdinando (1 h 50). http://distrib.pyramidefilms.com/pyramide-distribution-catalogue/vita-virginia.html

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