Lily Allen, Jack Whitehall and Timothy Spall also star in Tina Gharavi's SXSW London opener, which refashions Woolf's diffuse, ruminative feminist novel into a straightforwardly inspirational tale.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
@guylodge See All
Courtesy of WestEnd and Quiver Virginia Woolf herself was not the greatest admirer of her 1919 novel “Night and Day,” a complex and somewhat elusive work that wove a pensive reflection on women’s suffrage through a quasi-Shakespearean rotation of misbegotten and rearranged courtships — in a style far removed from the angular modernism of her later works. It remains perhaps the most underexposed of her books, and though it’s easy to imagine the period romantic comedy that Merchant-Ivory-style filmmakers might have made of it, it’s taken until now for anyone to attempt an adaptation. Though Tina Gharavi‘s film stresses its allegiance to the text with the title “Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day,” it’s actually quite a departure: Playing down the novel’s tangled relationships in favor of a straightforwardly empowering celebration of female agency and education, it trades some of the author’s elegance and nuance for a more crowdpleasing message.
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