Vita & Virginia

By: Jennifer Verzuh

Right away Isobel Waller-Bridge’s score sets the scene for the movie Vita & Virginia, doing so more abruptly than most would dare. For a film that takes place in England in the 1920s and 30s, it’s certainly not what you would expect to hear. With synth beats and a dreamy, electronic pop sound it’s shockingly modern, creating a fascinating juxtaposition between the past and present here. Interestingly, that’s true of every element and character in this film.

Based on a play of the same name by Eileen Atkins, which chronicles the true love affair between authors Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) and Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki), the film traces the duo’s romance in spite of their marriages and how it inspired Woolf’s classic novel Orlando. As with the play, the film uses Vita and Virginia’s numerous and increasingly intimate letters to one another as its basis. The actresses read them directly to the camera and their dialogue in scenes is also partially composed of quotations from them.

When we meet them our heroines are both grasping to find something new, rejecting the past. Virginia is attempting to abandon the classic traditional narrative and literary style to create a new way of capturing life and the present moment with modernism, despite the lack of commercial success she finds in doing so.

In defiance of her aristocratic familial background and high class status, Vita seeks a modern, free life.  She drives a car, dresses in trousers, has a successful writing career and carries on affairs with women. Yet she’s still forced to occasionally play the part of the dutiful wife to her diplomat husband at work functions, answers to her stern, traditional mother for income and is forever emotionally bound to her family’s large, grand estate that evokes a time long ago. In each other they each find inspiration to keep moving forward.

The two share a palpageable, magnetic chemistry. Their mutual attraction and fascination with one another is clear from the moment the two authors attend a Bloomsbury party thrown by Virginia’s artist sister Vanessa (Emerald Fennell), though Vita has much less hesitation in expressing it than Virginia. Vita is such a bold, lively figure and Arterton plays her with immense confidence and energy. She knows what she wants, which in this case is Virginia, and takes every possible step in securing it. She wears her heart on her sleeve and is largely unafraid, though we see in brief flickering moments that she can be vulnerable too at times.

Although equally witty, Virginia is her opposite in many ways as Debicki depicts her here as thoughtful, reserved and with a certain fragility. Even though it’s clearly thanks to the direction and writing she received, this portrayal is a bit frustrating. Virginia comes across as a sort of unknowable, enigmatic figure thanks to her genius and mental illness. It would have been great for us to actually get to know her beneath the cloud of mystery that surrounds her, but we’re never truly allowed in.

The biggest issue with this film though is that it doesn’t seem to know how to deal with the difficulties and dissolution of their relationship. As their love becomes strained, the tone and pacing become increasingly muddled. Director Chanya Button is clearly more comfortable with their budding love story and building up the tension to that first kiss than in investigating the problems that come after. Additionally, momentum and interest is lost in the scenes where Vita and Virginia aren’t together and separately deal with their family or spouses.

Overall though the film is a beautiful, handsomely made portrait of two brilliant women and the connection they shared, as well as an interesting ode to modernism with Vita representing it and Virginia writing it. It’s the rare period piece that doesn’t really feel like it’s from another era period, perhaps because the figures at its center were so very ahead of their time.

The film recently played at OutFest, an LGBT+ film festival in Los Angeles and will hit theaters in the US on August 23rd.