I doubt that many in this Saturday afternoon’s audience for ‘Vita & Virginia’ would be interested in going to see ‘The Fast and the Furious’, despite Vin Diesel’s exhortations to do so in an ad that preceded today’s showing of the Vita Sackville-West/Virginia Woolf film.
Thankfully the pre-film ads and trailers didn’t seem to go on for too long today and we were soon into the film we’d come to see.
The practice in recent years of soundtracking period pieces with modern music – perfectly executed in TV series Peaky Blinders – works brilliantly in ‘Vita & Virginia’, today’s film at DCA, directed by Chanya Button and featuring Gemma Arterton as successful author Vita Sackville-West and Elizabeth Debicki as the lower-selling but more iconic literary figure Virginia Woolf.
From the opening moments of the film, Isobel Waller-Bridge’s bold electronic music injects power and urgency into a milieu (the 1920s London literary scene) that in a lesser film could have been stodgy and sedate.
By not relying on genteel classical music, the film makers have elevated this film into something much more than a clichéd period drama.
The two leads give very good performances – Gemma Arterton as the persistent but fickle Vita, and Elizabeth Debicki as the wonderfully creative but psychologically fragile Virginia. The constantly changing dynamic of their relationship is at the core of this engaging and enjoyable film.
There are also strong supporting performances by Peter Ferdinando as Virginia’s husband Leonard and Adam Gillen as the painter Duncan Grant.
The only disappointment with ‘Vita & Virginia’ is that it doesn’t conjure up much atmosphere or feel for Bloomsbury, the part of London where the bohemian literati convened during the 1920s and 1930s. The scenes that are ostensibly set in Bloomsbury look like they could have been shot anywhere; from the IMDB list of production details, it looks like those scenes may have been shot in Dublin or Greenwich rather than in Bloomsbury.
After the film we headed out of DCA and down towards the river to St Andrew’s Brewing Company Caird Hall for a mid-afternoon lunch of haggis croquettes, tempura cauliflower, duck stovies and ‘The Asian Bowl’, a very tasty meal washed down with a pint of St Andrew’s golden ale and a Slessor cocktail.
The place was busy with what seemed like locals rather than tourists from the nearby V&A Dundee museum. Frequent peals of infectious, wine-fuelled laughter from a group at a nearby table provided an entertaining soundtrack to the meal.
Related Posts: ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’, Cinema Vendôme, Brussels, Belgium; ‘Anna Karenina’, The Phoenix Cinema, London