Review of Night and Day by Virginia Woolf – dream changes reach the stars | Video

HThis is an adaptation, written by Justine Waddell, of Virginia Woolf’s unusual work that deals with the difficulties of the daily life of a headstrong, well-born young woman in Edwardian London faced with the need to marry. What appears is a misguided, unworldly perspective, four pages of film – or even five pages; instead they are beautifully designed and painted, decorated with an unexpected German romantic style.

Waddell and the director born in Iran and nominated by Bafta, Tina Gharavi, contradicted the book’s content, expanding Woolf’s cosmic voice and making it at the center of the hero’s desire, perhaps putting a little memory of Cole Porter’s words to the song of the same title: “You are under the sun.” And – fortunately, in my opinion – the film removes Woolf’s great condescension towards the self-improvement of the newly educated lower and middle classes, and instead focuses on a sweet story, performed convincingly by her all-star cast, interspersed with dreamlike set pieces. The result is not exactly Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day; perhaps more of EM Forster’s Night and Day or Ronald Firbank’s Night and Day.

With spirit and charm, Haley Bennett plays the young Katharine Hilbery, the only child of rich parents (Timothy Spall and Jennifer Saunders), who is burdened by the history of her late grandmother Katharine, a famous poet and critic like B-part Ruskin or Carlyle, who writes his history with difficulty. Katharine is a self-taught astronomer trying to get into Cambridge University to study mathematics, and struggling with the school’s anti-feminism (female students were denied degrees in those days even if they were admitted). With her successful pacifist cousin Cyril (Misia Butler) she casually dresses as a man to disrupt a haughty all-male astronomy club – despite being innocent as a child about Cyril’s private life.

Realizing that her intellectual ambitions can only be achieved as a married woman, Katharine falls in love with her childhood friend William Rodney, played hilariously by Jack Whitehall: Rodney is a complete man who writes countless volumes of Elizabethan poetry and. Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. But now Katharine realizes that she may be interested in Ralph Denham (Elyas M’Barek), a young writer whose mother has hired him as her secretary to revise her biography.

It’s a sweet and imaginative story – butterflies flying beyond the wheel of reality.

Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day was featured on SXSW London; is in UK and Irish cinemas from 19 June and will be released in the US later this year.