Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West met in 1922. The former was a revolutionary woman of letters, and the latter a worldly aristocrat. When their paths crossed, the irresistible Vita set her sights on the brilliant and fragile Virginia.
A meeting that led to a passionate love affair in the 1920s between two writers who have not left the same mark: both were very ahead of their time, the former through her work, the latter through her scandalous and liberated life.
Thus began a passionate relationship that disregarded social conventions and their respective marriages. The fascination Virginia felt for Vita, the chasm between her artist’s life and the extravagance of the eccentric aristocrat, would inspire Orlando, one of her masterful works, a poignant reflection on gender and art.
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, their relationship as entirely contrasting authors (Virginia’s novels had yet to succeed, while Vita’s works were thriving), their love affair, which culminated in the fervent writing and fantastic romanticism of Orlando, published in 1928.
Inspired by a play and their abundant correspondence, Vita & Virginia displays a great classicism. The problem is that the staging doesn’t choose whether to entrust the ‘narration’ of the story to Vita or Virginia. Who relates it? The one who served as the model for Orlando, a great lesbian seductress and mediocre writer, or the author of Orlando, a great woman and immense writer?
Let us applaud the attempt of an epistolary film that provides an escape and a fervor to the chronicle of a love affair and its exhausting “times passing” segments. Here the passion is already written, already experienced and worn. The endurance of feelings, of writing, and of intertwined lives is thus replayed, recited, aiming for a purely theatrical emotion—this happiness, this pain, this regret as well as the calm that acting alone produces—and the actresses are convincing in this passion from the past.
Elizabeth Debicki towering beside Gemma Arterton, it’s daring; the film remains prudish.
