VITA & VIRGINIA

Chanya Button 2018 United Kingdom Ireland 110min English
Synopsis:
Replete with crackling dialogue, Vita & Virginia trades the ticking-off-boxes stuffiness of some biopics for a vigorous, contemporary take on this illustrious love story. These towering figures become as alive to us now as they were to themselves then, revelling in “bodies, bodies, bodies” and the explosive potential of “the present moment.” The film finds Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton), all well-bred petulance and fawning admiration when she isn’t being unendingly charming, in hot pursuit of the inner sanctum of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury coterie. That hotbed of artistic and moral modernism, wives pursuing trysts and husbands with other men in their bed, much like Vita’s own husband, Harold (Rupert Penry-Jones), whose same-sex pursuits don’t stop him from trying to keep Vita close. Meeting Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki, in a star-making turn of uncanny, robotic fluidity), Vita becomes enamoured with the prospect of penetrating her “dazzling,” “infuriating” mind. Thus begins a game of emotional chicken, these formidable women caught up in an attraction both hot-blooded and intellectual. All captured in fleet-footed fashion by Chanya Button’s direction, which conveys the insatiable need to claim one’s equal, or melt into madness doing so.