Virginia Woolf, the highest oracle for we sad literary girls, is all over the silver screen this summer—thanks to a remarkable trio of new adaptations.
Though her work is famously cerebral—and, well, literary—this is far from Virginia’s first celluloid rodeo. In 1992, the feminist filmmaker Sally Potter took on Woolf’s Orlando, crafting a feverish delight with Tilda Swinton at the center.
In 1997, Marleen Gorris and screenwriter Eileen Atkins took a pass at Mrs. Dalloway, helmed by another grand dame of England (Vanessa Redgrave). And in 2003, we saw a trifecta of best actresses inhabit various Virginias in Stephen Daldry/Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.
To everything, there is a season. But the blooms this summer are once again giving…bury. As David Hudson observed in Criterion, “by some odd coincidence, two new re-imaginings of Mrs. Dalloway have appeared this year within weeks of each other.” And there’s even more Virginia to meet this fall, when Tina Gharavi’s blithe take on Woolf’s Night & Day hits theaters.
So, what’s in the water?
Like their strongest predecessors, all three of the new adaptations riff on the source material. Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa transports Woolf’s infamous heroine to Lagos. Critically acclaimed at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the new, Nigerian Clarissa (played by Sophie Okonedo) was lauded in Variety as “radiant with melancholy.”
Devika Girish at Film Comment noted that the class conscious and critical contents of the Esiri brothers’ “post-colonial adaptation” works especially well in new situ.
“Woolf’s fragmented, time- and perspective-hopping novel—about a high-society lady hosting a party and ruminating on lost, youthful loves and life choices, while elsewhere in the same city, a World War I veteran suffers from severe PTSD,” she wrote, “is transposed nearly seamlessly to present-day Nigeria.”
The Last Day takes similar liberties with time and place, even as it honors a Woolfian liminality. The brainchild of visual artist Rachel Rose, this textured new spin on Dalloway follows two women around present-day New York on the Fourth of July.
Rose is known, per Variety, for “her sensorially-led video installations examining the human condition and its relationship to the natural world.” Critics have praised this Dalloway riff for its entrancing, uncanny visuals. Angie Han in The Hollywood Reporter called the film “an experience whose impact is more easily felt than explained.”
Which all speaks to Virginia’s vibes. I have my obvious guesses as to why melancholy, post-colonialism, and Wagner Moura are calling to the indoor kids this summer. But what then to make of Night & Day?
This adaptation could be the largest tonal departure in this fair crop. In a warm review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw cited its charming leads, and praised a certain whimsy in the filmmaking.
He also appreciated the way Gharavi’s take on an early book has “creatively gone against the grain of the novel, amplifying Woolf’s single glancing reference to astronomy and making that the centre of the heroine’s yearning.”
If not vibes, then maybe the common condiment in all these adaptations is just that: yearning. Virginia had insight into much of the human condition. But it’s her ability to render achy need that transcends time and space.
As Blair McClendon, editor of Clarissa, put it to Film Comment: wherever and whenever these Woolfian women go, they have the same problem, “which is making love work. And then class and sex and gender and colonialism intrude as organizing forces in their lives.”
Evergreen stuff.
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