Vita & Virginia : a tale of literary lesbian love

It is plain to see why, on paper, Vita & Virginia was an easy choice to pick as the flagship opening movie for the 2019 British Film Institute Flare LGBT festival. It checks all the boxes. British costume drama? Literary heritage? Lesbians? Gays? Transexual narrative? Sex? Flawless period costumes? Sets like oil paintings? Check. Check. Check. Check. Check.  

But is it any good? 

The movie is at its strongest in reflecting the ebbs and flows of the passion the women have for each other. At first Vita Sackville West is the aggressor. She sets her sights on Virginia Woolf, the literary radical, who has the credibility she has yet to achieve regardless of selling more books. Virginia holds back, intrigued but too locked in by words to let her body free. The story turns around the swapping of roles. Virginia is seduced eventually leading Vita to lose interest after the conquest and find other women. Virginia then turns instinctively back to where she feels most in control – her writing. She pens the one of the most striking books of her career, Orlando, dedicated to Vita. Orlando becomes Woolf’s most popular work, telling the story of a hero who transitions from male to female. Vita is flattered and overwhelmed by the thinly veiled portrait of herself. And so, their relationship goes back and forth based on their revolving feelings rather than intrusive plot twists. 

Vita (Gemma Arterton) is an aristocratic hunter who stalks Virginia proudly. She has a highly accommodative marriage that allows her sexual freedom. However, her husband still wants her to be more discreet, despite being caught up in his own gay flings.  He starts to be perturbed by the “Sapphic Pageant” her life has become. At one point he needles her by saying that he accepts that she likes to have her cake and eat it, but does she have to have “so many cakes”? Overall it is a narrow portrait of West. We see her emotional hunger but are not really shown the accomplished woman (Novelist, poet, journalist and influential garden designer) who had more than beauty to win willing admirers. 

Virginia (Elizabeth Debicki) is frail and fractured. She is confident with her words but less so with her writing talent. There is a need in her that struggles to find expression. When she finally does and loses herself in wordless passion it brings her to the edge of destruction.  Only briefly is she reprieved when she puts her feelings for Vita into the form of the novel Orlando. 

Vita & Virginia is a crossword puzzle of a movie. Every line is deliberately heavy with meaning.  Dialogue is too elevated to grasp immediately. Conversations on any subject trudge towards higher philosophical purpose. There are no casual observations or incidental expressions. As such it’s a huge effort for the actors to get the lines out in cut glass accents, with perfect pronunciation and appropriate emphasis. Which they manage. But it does not leave much room for acting. The necessity to get the words out sidelines the other aspects of performance. The screenwriting pays too much homage to literature and a lot of it would work better on paper than screen.  

So, if you like a demanding literary crossword puzzle you may be rewarded with the intellectual satisfaction of completing the challenge of this movie. Like reading Woolf it is not necessarily purely for pleasure.