Virginia Woolf herself was not the biggest fan of her 1919 novel Night and Day. The novel was a complex and somewhat elusive work, weaving pensive reflections on women’s suffrage through a quasi-Shakespearean rotation of misplaced and rearranged courtships, in a style far removed from the angular modernism of her later work. This film remains perhaps the least exposed of her works, and although it is easy to imagine that a Merchant Ivory-style director could have used it to create a period romantic comedy, no one has taken the time to attempt an adaptation. Although Tina Galavi’s film emphasizes its allegiance to the text titled “Night and Day of Virginia Woolf,” it actually deviates considerably. It downplays the novel’s tangled relationships for an honest celebration of women’s agency and education, trading some of the author’s grace and nuance for a more audience-pleasing message.
Whether it will please many audiences remains to be seen. Set in London and widely accessible, “Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day” was a fitting opening for the second edition of the SXSW London Multimedia Fest, held a few weeks before its UK theatrical run. However, given its relatively unknown source material and solid cast of well-known characters despite its lack of major screen attention, the film may be better viewed on streaming platforms around the world. For Iranian-born filmmaker Gharavi, who was nominated for a BAFTA for her punchy 2013 feature debut I Am Nasrin, this cleanly dressed and horse-riding film proves that she can live up to the demands of traditional British cinema, albeit in a direction that doesn’t really interest her.
Haley Bennett, an American, can seem amorphously cosmopolitan when projects like Cyrano and Widow Clicquot require her to do so, but she’s a bubbly, likable anchor in the films surrounding her. She plays Catherine (or Kit, depending on the mood), a lively, intellectually curious young woman living in Edwardian London with a particular passion for astronomy, and she sports a convincing cut-glass accent. Astronomy was one of the many fields of study that was forbidden to women at the time, even relatively wealthy women like Catherine. She has to dress as a man to attend lectures at the Royal Astronomical Society, while her dreams of pursuing independent studies at Cambridge are met with patriarchal opposition.
Her difficult father (Timothy Spall) wants her to find a suitable husband. She eventually accepts the proposal of her childhood friend William (comedian Jack Whitehall, easily adapting his distinctive upper-class persona to the times), a hipster and talentless poet, and turns everyone away from her. Her closest male ally, her cousin Cyril (Misia Butler), is appalled by her pragmatism in this regard. A significant change from the novel in which the main character openly fathered a child out of wedlock, here he is an ostracized homosexual who is unwilling to lie to get an easy path out of society. Naturally, as soon as Catherine enters into a loveless engagement, sparks fly with Ralph (Elias Mubarek), a literary editor whose father asks her to tame the unwieldy manuscript of her aspiring writer mother (Jennifer Saunders)—an ostensibly gentle but ultimately controlling male gesture.
Although it is the heart of the novel, the relationship between Catherine and Ralph is never a focus in Justin Waddell’s adaptation, as all male characters other than Cyril are significantly shortened in the film. More screen time is devoted to the fire brigade’s budding friendship with suffragist Mary, played by singer Lily Allen in a deliberately anachronistic performance, her frank speech and demeanor coming straight from the 21st century. The two women are more closely connected here than in the novel, where their individualistic and more community-oriented positions were subtly contrasted. The film favors a stronger, more unified representation of female solidarity, and is persuasive through dialogue that, in some ways, verges on discourse. (On at least one occasion, this rational, progressive rhetoric was quite satisfying, when an enraged Catherine gave a speech for what-for-nothing to a sexist university selection committee.)
Still, Bennett’s lively, stubborn performance sometimes feels like it’s swimming against not only the currents of an outdated society, but also the solidity of the film itself. Galavi tries to enliven the proceedings with a shaky handheld camera and an electro-tinged score that eventually drifts into Ellie Goulding-esque ethereal pop during the ending credits, but “Night and Day” can feel like a talkative, stilted didactic, even if its convictions are sincere. Well-intentioned but ultimately relatable in both message and presentation, the film has much to say about bolder futures to come, but the filmmaking does little to disrupt the status quo.
