Tina Gharavi’s newest film, Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, has billed itself as an ‘unromantic comedy’.
While the original novel reads as more of an ensemble piece, this new take puts one of the story’s four main characters, Katherine (Kitt to her mates), at its heart, extrapolating on her book counterpart’s inner dreams of becoming an astronomer and putting that sense of longing front and centre for all to see. Such a move explains why Woolf’s name is kept in the title: this isn’t an adaptation that plays fast and loose with its heritage. Instead, it’s simply shining a greater light on the original 1919 text and taking full advantage of our modern world where the book’s suffrage subtexts can be discussed in earnest.
‘I am older than you. I know more of the world than you. Did I ever mention I’m named after William the Conqueror?’
Writer Justine Waddell’s script paints Katherine as a truly starry-eyed and intelligent young astronomer – we first meet her skinny dipping in a lake in the dead of night, looking up at the constellations in the sky and remarking at their Grecian names. ‘Show me how big you are’ she whispers to the stars as she looks to her telescope for answers.
Her hopes and horizons are set on making a name for herself in her field, despite the oppressively insular male circles of academia and the local societies, but her mother and father (played by Jennifer Saunders and Timothy Spall respectively) have other plans. They’d prefer she marry her childhood friend, William Rodney (Jack Whitehall, in case you felt this cast wasn’t British enough!) to secure a place for herself in society. Though William’s nice (nice and dim, as with many of Whitehall’s characters over the years) Katherine is aghast at the idea.
As much as Haley Bennett does a good job bringing some flair and audacity to Katherine, especially in a pivotal monologue to an audience of stuffy-suited scholars near the end, there’s a sense that this is all well-trod ground.
We’ve seen plenty of characters like her on the page and on the screen and an early, Portia-esque tomboyish outing which sees her dressing up in a suit and putting on a deep voice to try and reason with the misogynistic masses in the society’s grand hall feels particularly outdated, even with the feminist slant that the film would like to take.
The intention is absolutely there – you can clearly the filmmakers focus grouping each move and deciding which angle was best to take – but when, for example, Katherine strips down to her undergarments to burn her shackling clothes, it just rings rather hollow. The film often goes all-in on similar moments that don’t feel entirely earned or fully-established within the narrative (I’ve heard there were a lot of cuts made in the edit, and the finished film does have an unfinished (or at the very least unpolished) feel to it.
The relationships, in particular, felt lacking to me – I wasn’t invested in the central ones, especially the burgeoning romance, which felt like a problem. Given that the book is over 400 pages long and this film barely clears 90 minutes, there were obvious sacrifices made (necessary sacrifices – anyone who tries to take on a 1:1 adaptation of anything is kidding themselves) but I was left wondering if the team had made the best selections when choosing what to keep and what to throw on the cutting room floor.
It didn’t feel long, but certain sections felt detrimentally slow-paced and with such a capable cast, I was really hoping for more in the way of levity beyond the light and charming score, which toes the line between period accuracy and anachronistic pop.
When the film manages to involve each member of the family, whether they’re observing a gorgeous star or, brilliantly, bickering like children as they scramble together to try and take a family portrait, colliding with one another as the photographer slowly loses his wick. Those moments work really well; it’s just a shame there aren’t much more of them.
BBFC: Rated 12A for discrimination, upsetting scenes.
Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day is in cinemas now.
