Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West met at a party.i According to historical records this was a dinner party, but in Chanya Button’s second feature, Vita & Virginia, what we get is a decadent costumed affair in which Bloomsbury’s avant-garde dress and dance more like artists at a 2019 Camberwell queer night.ii See, the film seems to insist, slightly heavy-handedly, they’re ahead of their time! During these self-consciously bohemian revels Vita (Gemma Arterton) watches Virginia (Elizabeth Debicki) sway dreamily above the crowd (she’s six-foot-three) in a powder-blue Tudor doublet and breeches. This is the film’s first nod to Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928), and also to Sally Potter’s film adaptation (1992), to which Vita & Virginia’s lavish costumes and maximalist sets owe a clear visual debt. The film follows Vita and Virginia’s relationship from their cautious first meeting to the writing of Orlando, which Vita’s son famously described as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature”, although the film frames it as Virginia’s way of getting over Vita – a sort of long and charming break-up text.iii Button’s source material is the Eileen Atkins play (1992) of the same name (Atkins and Button wrote the screenplay together) and, of course, Vita and Virginia’s collected correspondence: over 500 letters spanning two decades, ranging in tone from deathless romance to publishing shoptalk to bizarre inside jokes.iv Now out of print, they have become a literary lesbian Bible, scoured for in second-hand bookshops and bearing the millennial honour of their own Twitter bot, @VitaVirginiaBot.
Of the romance, Button said that “Their relationship was with their own sexualities, as much as with each other,” which suggests that if bullet vibrators had been on general sale in the ‘20s Virginia Woolf might not have had to go to the trouble of finding a girlfriend.
Since Carol it’s almost a truism to say that a lesbian film runs on the exchange of loaded glances, but Vita & Virginia portrays the female gays’ female gaze particularly well. The two women spend so much time missing each other’s glances (Vita stares at Virginia in conversation with someone else; Virginia turns away from the halo of a solar eclipse to watch Vita watching the sun) that when their eyes meet the screen sizzles. Every early touch (there is a memorable moment in a Kew greenhouse where Virginia presses her finger to Vita’s clavicle) is heavy with tension. Virginia’s first experience of queer sex is depicted as revelatory, an opening-up of possibilities, and is one of the film’s most effective scenes. Although Debicki plays this beautifully, credit should also go to Arterton’s convincing femme top energy (and deft left arm). Conservative fans of Woolf stubbornly maintain that her relationship with Vita was primarily intellectual, marred by a few failed hook-ups, and she’s still generally thought of as a cerebral, sexless genius. In one scene Virginia notes her sexual “disconnect” with her husband Leonard (Peter Ferdinando, playing the staid feminist ally that dreams are made of), and her conviction that there was “something wrong with her.” The sex scene proves her wrong. Despite this rather lovely depiction of a woman unsatisfied by men and radically transformed by women, Button and Arterton have avoided describing Woolf as a lesbian in interviews. Of the romance, Button said that “Their relationship was with their own sexualities, as much as with each other,” which suggests that if bullet vibrators had been on general sale in the ‘20s Virginia Woolf might not have had to go to the trouble of finding a girlfriend. Perhaps spooked by the feminist and lesbian backlash against the likes of Blue Is The Warmest Colour and the abstracted bogeyman of the Male Gaze, Arterton is at pains to stress that Vita & Virginia’s sex scene is not a “gratuitous boobs out […] sort of thing.”v It is the heterosexual woman’s tragedy to be unable to conceive of an openly sexual gaze onto a woman that isn’t male, or to figure a two-directional “lesbian look” like that described by Chris Straayer: “a returning look, not just a receiving look.”vi
Button avoids the recent trend of middle-of-the-road lesbian films, like Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience (2017) and Craig Macneill’s Lizzie (2018), to leave their scripts frustratingly sparse. Vita and Virginia actually talk to each other, which is nice. Much of this dialogue is lifted directly from their letters, and the uneasy transference of the written to the spoken word gives conversations a poetic, non-naturalistic strangeness, gratifying for those of us tired of dogged realism in queer cinema. Direct-to-camera sequences where characters sensually lick envelopes and read letters aloud are formally risky, but somehow still seductive. Unfortunately, the deployment of beautifully crafted phrases by famous writers means that, by contrast, sentences written for the film are frequently ungainly and jarring. Despite all this, what the film lacks most is the sense that Vita and Virginia actually liked each other. Certainly they are supposed to be in love, but this love seems to range from humourlessly intense to vaguely antagonistic, and their conversation is relentlessly high-minded. The problem isn’t just that this interpretation misses one of the best revelations of the Vita-Virginia letters, which is the endearing quotidian humanity of a vaunted genius. (Virginia is silly with Vita; she makes stupid jokes; she invents an imaginary furry creature and calls it ‘Potto’.) It’s also that it feels like an insidiously heteronormative reading of a queer relationship. As consumers of popular culture we are well-versed in the ‘passionate love story’ of the straight couple who are lovers but never friends – who seem to have nothing in common and share no real affection outside the bedroom. Queer love, by contrast, is never the default. It is never held up exclusively by the unsteady foundations of sexual compatibility and social expectations; now and in the 1920s, a queer relationship must be cultivated against the odds by partners who believe it is worth the effort. Button has boasted of the film’s romance, “People so far have said they sort of forget it’s between two women.”vii I can’t think of a worse sin for a fictional gay relationship to commit than to be indistinguishable from a straight one. Woolf certainly never forgot it was a woman she was in love with. She was obsessed with the way Vita inhabited femininity: her maternity, her glamour, “her being in short (what I have never been) a real woman.”viii (A neat little scene of Virginia trying on, then scrubbing off, Vita’s lipstick hints at this tension, but the film never explores it fully.) Famously, she discussed in A Room of One’s Own the “immense change” that could be wrought on culture and literature by loving relationships between women: “Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”ix
I can’t think of a worse sin for a fictional gay relationship to commit than to be indistinguishable from a straight one.
Elizabeth Debicki as Virginia holds the film together. She is by turns withdrawn, curious, chilly, forward, witty, domineering, and waifish, defined not by her vulnerability but her openness: to idea, affect, sensation, experience. She is obsessed with bodies and movement, and with the limits and possibilities of knowledge. (Only occasionally does Debicki’s brittle physicality veer into over-the-top, neurotic twitchiness.) Biography, and the writing of it – Orlando is a fictionalised, fantastical life of Vita, but a life of Vita nonetheless – is a theme throughout. What Virginia wants is to know Vita, to crawl inside her head through conversation, thought, and touch, which is such a queer impulse that it almost makes up for Vita & Virginia’s other failings in that area. The film’s bigger problem is with Vita. This isn’t surprising; she’s a problematic figure. Reading her life, as written by her biographer Victoria Glendinning and others, you find that for every instance of admirable feminist behaviour there is another which is frustrating, confusing, or repellent; Vita doesn’t fit very well into 21st-century socio-political boxes. The film juxtaposes nicely the conservatism of Vita’s upbringing (her family’s stately home, a gargantuan warren of heirloom furniture and hunting trophies; the always-delightful cliché of an aristocratic couple eating at opposite ends of a very long table) with her modern sensibilities (she wears trousers; she smokes; she drives a car). Her conversations with her husband Harold (played with long-suffering stiff upper lip by Rupert Penry-Jones) are full of well-phrased, slightly tiresome feminist pronouncements: you can imagine “Independence has no sex” on a mug in someone’s Etsy shop, alongside one with “Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Had the film acknowledged Vita’s paternalistic disdain for working class people or unpalatable expressions of gendered conservatism, she would have become a less likeable character. But as it is Vita & Virginia doesn’t seem to want us to like her much anyway. She never manages to be fascinating, difficult, impossible to pin down; she is instead a borderline lesbian predator without much interiority, whose “relentless pursuit” led to “Virginia giving herself to Vita emotionally and sexually” – God forbid!x In a 1930 letter Woolf described Vita as “subtle, profound, humorous, arch, coy, satirical, affectionate, solemn” and more besides. Vita & Virginia’s Vita is mostly coy. She pouts and giggles like a public schoolgirl. In a film about Orlando, 134 pages of genius on the odd magnetism of Vita Sackville-West, this Orlando just doesn’t match up. It becomes difficult to believe what Virginia tells us about Vita when hardly any of it is borne out on-screen. There is none of her gangling, self-possessed androgyny, which in life captured the attention of Woolf and so many other women. “I enjoy the qualities in myself that may be said to be masculine,” says Vita in one scene, but it is difficult to equate Arterton’s besuited high femme with the boy Orlando, or indeed the Vita who passed as a man simply by wearing trousers and hiding her hair under a bandage.
Button’s reading of the relationship as a challenge to Virginia’s mental health which she overcame through her triumphant creative powers does a disservice to the genuine devotion which kept them regularly exchanging nostalgic, flirty letters for the ten-or-so years between the waning of the most intense period of their romance and Virginia’s death in 1941.xi The whiplash pacing doesn’t help; haphazardly cramming events spanning almost a decade into two hours, with no real sense of the passing of time, will obviously flatten character and nuance. In its contrast between Virginia’s morbid introspection and Vita’s relentless forward momentum, the break-up scene cuts to the heart of the characters, but it also forces an unnecessary sense of closure. In a film about people whose ways of living and forming relationships disavowed the conventional, the formulaic, and the linear – whose lives were, in a word, queer – it is a shame to see such convention, formula, and linearity imposed upon them in retrospect. Vita & Virginia is disappointing mostly because it takes one of the most beloved, influential, and strange lesbian relationships of the 20th century and makes it into something basically ordinary, a mannered cliché. The final sequence is a rapid series of stills of rooms in Vita’s ancestral home, Knole: lush jewel-toned fabrics, expensive dark wood walls, everything pristine and empty. “Orlando naturally loved solitary places,” Woolf wrote of Sackville-West, “and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.” These last shots are visually sumptuous, and tell us something clever and quietly moving about the central characters. They left me wishing Vita & Virginia’s always-luxurious aesthetics had been deployed with such intellectual heart throughout the rest of the film.
i The 1922 dinner party is discussed in Woolf’s journal and in Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, eds., The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2001), 16. ii The costumes are generally not historically inaccurate, but deployed in anachronistic ways to make clunky points about character. Vita wears beach pyjama trousers and tweed plus-fours to show that she is an unconventional, ahead-of-her-time woman with masculine attributes. These garments had specific contextual boundaries dictating when they were appropriate, and it was a mark of new-money déclassé to wear them outside those spaces. Someone as old money and image-obsessed as Vita certainly wouldn’t have done it. iii Nigel Nicholson, Portrait of a Marriage (New York: Athenaeum, 1973), 202. iv First published as Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, eds., The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (London: Hutchinson, 1984). v Claire Armitstead, “’I felt kind of promiscuous’: Gemma Arterton on Vita and Virginia”, The Guardian, June 27, 2019. vi Chris Straayer, “The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1990. vii Claire Armitstead, “’I felt kind of promiscuous’: Gemma Arterton on Vita and Virginia”, The Guardian, June 27, 2019. viii Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf vol. III (London: Penguin, 1980), 52. ix Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), 123. x Chanya Button, “Orlando, David Bowie and the Pronoun Revolution,” Charleston, July 4, 2019. xi Button discusses this idea in her essay for the Charleston Trust, “Orlando, David Bowie and the Pronoun Revolution”.
Martha Perotto-Wills is a London-based writer and graduate student, working on lesbian cultural history in the interwar period.
