Chanya Button (2018)

There have been successful translations of epistolary material to stage and screen – like Christopher Hampton’s play Les liaisons dangereuses and, to a lesser extent, the subsequent Stephen Frears film Dangerous Liaisons (with a screenplay by Hampton).  In that case, though, the source is a piece of fiction and Choderlos de Laclos’s original novel is shaped for dramatic effect.  It’s a different matter when an exchange-of-letters piece derives from real life, from the writings of people who didn’t expect their correspondence to have a theatrical afterlife.  Even an enduringly popular example of the genre like Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road makes for awkward viewing (it may be fine to listen to:  I’ve never heard the radio play version).  Last year’s national touring production of James Roose-Evans’s stage version of Hanff’s book exuded unease that the visually static set-up wouldn’t be lively enough for the audience, resulting in feeble attempts to inject ‘action’ into the proceedings.

Eileen Atkins’s dramatisation of letters exchanged by Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf was staged first at Chichester in 1992 and the following year in the West End (with Atkins as Woolf and Penelope Wilton as Sackville-West).  Now the play has been adapted for the screen by Atkins and Vita & Virginia’s director, Chanya Button, with Gemma Arterton as Vita and Elizabeth Debicki as Virginia.  The narrative focuses on the romantic and sexual relationship between the title characters, which formed a relatively short part of their lengthy friendship, and on how that relationship served to inspire Woolf’s Orlando.  The film, which premiered at Toronto last year, was the opening night gala offering at this month’s BFI Flare festival.  The gala screening included interviews with the director and others.  They weren’t present at the next day screening that I went to but the BFI’s handout – production notes in Q&A format – gives a presumably accurate flavour of their intentions and priorities.

According to the notes, the people behind Vita & Virginia ‘didn’t like the phrase “period drama” to describe this film because the characters … were so cutting edge for the time’ (Gemma Arterton) and knew this ‘was never going to feel like a sleepy period drama.  It should feel contemporary and punk and edgy’ (Chanya Button).  In terms of music and costume, the filmmakers deliver something of what they set out to deliver.  Isobel Waller-Bridge’s score, though it occasionally sounds indebted to the Philip Glass music in Stephen Daldry’s Woolf-centred The Hours (2002), has an anti-nostalgic dynamism.  Some of Lorna Mugan’s clothes exaggerate details of 1920s fashion to create a vividly stylised effect.  Otherwise, the film is remarkably lifeless.  Arterton and Button needn’t have worried about its being regarded as a period drama.  It isn’t a drama at all.

For approaching two hours, the characters stand or sit in rooms where they deliver lines.  The opulent décor is further enhanced by Carlos de Carvalho’s photography, which also gives a glow to external shots of the posh houses containing the posh rooms.  In one scene, Virginia has an attack of aphasia, signalling a nervous breakdown, though she soon recovers the power of speech.  A couple of times, she and Vita go to bed together, where they stop talking and the camera contemplates discreet amounts of flawless naked flesh.  This isn’t, however, a motion picture in any meaningful sense of the term – and Chanya Button doesn’t use stasis to reflect claustrophobia or inertia on the part of the people on the screen.  The culmination of Vita & Virginia‘s decorative inaction comes in a sequence at the British ambassador’s residence in Berlin, currently occupied by Vita and her diplomat husband Sir Harold Nicolson.  A parcel arrives in the post:  Vita sits alone in a vast dining room with her hot-off-the-Hogarth-Press copy of Orlando.  There are close-ups of a couple of the book’s pages and of Virginia’s dedication of it to Vita.  But what the scene chiefly conveys is the trouble the set dresser went to adorning the embassy dining table for the sake of a brief glimpse by the camera.  We don’t even see the whole table.

Gemma Arterton speaks in a put-on cut-glass accent, complete with rolling Rs that disappear after a while.  Elizabeth Debicki is extraordinary enough to make you think she might be a rather good Virginia in the unlikely event of The Hours II.   The supporting cast, which also includes Rupert Penry-Jones as Harold Nicolson and Peter Ferdinando as Leonard Woolf, is competent but Isabella Rossellini, as Vita’s poisonously bigoted mother, is the only performer whose presence and facial movements suggest that she might be taking part in a movie.  Rossellini, in other words, is thoroughly incongruous in Vita & Virginia.

22 March 2019