Female Film Critics 24/375
The real-life romance between writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West takes center stage in Chanya Button’s provocative period drama Vita & Virginia. Exploring sexuality and passion, desire and connection, the film features strong performances by Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki, and a script by Eileen Atkins that effectively incorporates the two literary legends’ own words.
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Vita & Virginia, Chanya Button’s moving biopic about the clandestine love affair between two fiercely independent, modernist 20th-century authors, the legendary Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki) and the lesser known novelist-poet Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton), is firmly rooted in their writings and literary ambitions.
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There is much to love about Vita & Virginia, the new release directed by Chanya Button, and co-written by Button and actress Eileen Atkins. Atkins adapted the story from her successful stage play, in which she starred as famed writer Virginia Woolf opposite Vanessa Redgrave, who portrayed her lover, socialite and intellectual Vita Sackville-West.
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Vita and Virginia and, especially, Gemma Arterton’s role of Vita Sackville-West, has the daunting task of naturally drawing comparisons with the brilliant 1990 BBC miniseries Portrait of a Marriage with Janet McTeer’s masterful embodiment of Sackville-West during her passionate romance with Violette Keppel (Cathryn Harrison). In the new film, Sackville-West has moved on from Violette and becomes enamored of fellow writer Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki).
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In the midst of movies that call for blood, curses, and mayhem, “em>Tea with the Dames offers those ingredients elegantly and eloquently from dames of the British realm who are also stars of stage and screen. At tea are Dame and Lady Joan Plowright, Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Judi Dench, and Dame Eileen Atkins.Tea with the Dames is literate, funny, poignant, a respite and a reminder. Utterly delicious, this tea with Champagne with the Dames.
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