Vita & Virginia review: Bloomsbury bed-hopping at its most chaste and straight-laced
Dir: Chanya Button. Cast: Gemma Arterton, Elizabeth Debicki, Isabella Rossellini, Rupert Penry-Jones, Peter Ferdinando, Emerald Fennell. 12A cert, 110 mins
“I’m really exhausted with this Sapphic pageant,” announces Harold Nicolson (Rupert Penry-Jones), the oft-neglected husband of Vita Sackville-West, in the graceful, muted literary biopic Vita & Virginia. The film makes him even more long-suffering than Leonard Woolf (Peter Ferdinando), Virginia’s other half, who’s generally too busy proofing all the books to worry unduly about the love affair taking place on his doorstep – which the film claims was the most overwhelmingly physical experience of Virginia’s life. “I simply don’t believe in jealousy,” is Leonard’s own summation, whether we entirely trust it or not.
The two women, played respectively by a clipped, voracious Gemma Arterton and a drowsily melancholic Elizabeth Debicki, circle each other at first and send letters. Arterton has weakened her Rs to a posh wobble, thrusts herself forward and gives us a very technical performance which works, up to a point, for this role.
Vita’s writing, much more popular than Woolf’s as the film begins, is critiqued by the latter as pushy and artificial. She’s “evasive but sparkling”. She worries about being hollow inside – an insecure socialite with nothing to say.
Woolf, for her part, seems to be drifting disconsolately towards her muddy death as surely as Millais’s Ophelia – racing to the water’s edge, even, in one OTT moment of foreshadowing. Debicki, louche and gangly, captures something of her amused bearing, but doesn’t amuse you back. Rarely taking advantage of this actress’s gift for fatigued, raised-eyebrow comedy, it’s a straight-up portrait of mental illness, registering in its details as a more depressive take on the character than Nicole Kidman’s Oscar-winning work in The Hours.
They’re both helped and hindered by the script, adapted by Chanya Button from the play Eileen Atkins wrote in 1992. It has its clunky share of name-dropping, or title-dropping, moments: “She’s just finished To The Lighthouse!”; “I’ve left him reading Mrs Dalloway!”. The bon mots are dangled with different degrees of knowing self-regard.
There are sharp ideas nested away in it about the demands of biography – to come up with a character who is both a real person and a literary creation at the same time. Button’s film wants to blur these principles with our presumptions about biopics. How did these two size up, scrutinise and reinvent each other – how did their tempestuous fling take flight on the page, not just in life? After all, Sackville-West was the inspiration for Orlando, Woolf’s most famous character and the original gender-fluid icon.
We already have a film of Orlando, though – Sally Potter’s 1992 fantasia – which feels more authentically queer, risk-taking and adventurous than anything here. Button does have some modest ideas to make the film feel modern, including a trancey score by Isobel Waller-Bridge, and bespoke touches of CGI – the vines that unfurl around a gatepost when the women first say goodbye, and a murder of crows attacking Virginia from the sky, Hitchcock-style, as madness takes hold.
For a film so focused on the bed-hopping antics of the Bloomsbury Set, it’s surprisingly chaste and straight-laced, though – and there are moments which stray towards finger-wagging judgement about the unhappiness encoded in these open relationships. Repression – and the repression of women – is an important theme, but the romance here never pushes the boat out, or especially catches fire.
The two writers narrowly skirt scandal, unlocking each other’s potential to scale new professional heights. But the film seems to skirt along with them, hanging on every word like a groupie too overawed to interject.
