Trite and fey
*
Not much happens in Virginia Woolf’s early novel Night and Day; nevertheless, director Tina Gharavi, in her version, manages to miss out most of the small number of significant events, and instead packs her film out with plenty of her own inventions. Woolf, one of the best and most important novelists of her time, was little more than a fledgeling in 1919 when she published Night and Day. It was by no means her best work. But it did give notice of her intention to focus on thought and feeling, rather than action. She knew that the bulk of events in human life take place in the imagination, not in reality. So characters in Night and Day imagine conversations and events, and the reader often has to draw back and recognise this stylistic feature to understand that the character is daydreaming this action, not living it. This later developed into Woolf’s ‘stream of consciousness’ style, taken to extremes by James Joyce, and influenced by Freudian theories. Woolf recognised that the mind is the master of our lives.
The intriguing problem for the film maker is how to translate this literary property to the filmic medium - a problem that clearly defeated Gharvani, whose feeble attempt relies on an unrecognisable plot propped up with trite clichés and a cast of comedic actors unsuitable for the job. The casting director had a nightmare. Jack Whitehall as poet William Rodney does not work at all. Whitehall’s simpering, shallow, schoolboyish manner does no justice to the complexity of Woolf’s unlikeable character. The same can be said of Mrs Hilbery (Jennifer Saunders). The tone created by these stand-ups is more suited to a P G Wodehouse story than a Woolk novel.
Mary Datchet (Lily Allen) has her role shrunken by Gharavi, perhaps a comment on her acting skills. But worst, by far, is the dismantling of the character of Ralph Denham (Elyas M’Barek). Here is the opportunity to present an intelligent, lower middle class young man besotted by an upper class girl already engaged to a temperamental upper-class snob. Why, then, does Gharavi cast him as Persian? Because she herself is Iranian? Was she so desperate to shoehorn her own cultural heritage into this? Like the ugly sisters and the glass slipper, it simply doesn’t fit.
One of Woolf’s many strengths is her ability to imbue several characters with psychological depth. Their thoughts and actions defy logic and predictability. They are the antithesis of stereotypes. Would that Gharavi had the same skill.
Mary, in the film and the novel, is working for the suffragette movement, facing political opposition, striving to produce leaflets and promotional material. The scenes featuring the printing presses are some of the most convincing in the film. But Mary, like all the others, is a trimmed down shell of a character in comparison to Woolf’s creation.
The novel’s main character is Katharine. She is interested in maths and astronomy, but goes into very little detail about these hobbies. Gharavi leaps onto this and centres the whole film around Katharine’s genius with numbers and discoveries in astronomy. She sets the plot specifically in 1910 so that Halley’s Comet can be brought into the story. She applies to study physics at Cambridge, and is rejected at interview, sparking a self- righteous rollicking from the heroine to the three stuffy interviewers. She tells them that one day Cambridge will have female students. Actually it happened in 1869, 41 years earlier, but there’s still a valid point to be made. A subsequent letter arrives offering Katherine a place. Her father opens it, to the music of the Alegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Other music is available, one wants to tell the director. The King’s Speech got there before you, and Colin Firth walking towards the BBC microphones for this momentous occasion slightly dwarfs the opening of this letter. It’s one of a number of clichés that serve to irritate rather than inspire. The inevitable look down the spiral staircase is another. And Cyril – in the novel- is a shocker for fathering children, unmarried. In this version, he takes a gay lover, and more shocking, that lover is a black man. Why? The film is set in 1910, and the illegitimate children story would have been shocking enough. There is no need to patronise the 2026 audience with an updated version of moral outrage material. It smacks of second-rate television drama like Call the Midwife and Downton Abbey where each episode centres on a ‘topical’ moral issue slightly varnished for the all-knowing modern-minded viewer.
The film ends with Katharine at Cambridge being visited by Ralph, who kisses her before going off to Persia. It’s not how Woolf saw it, and she would wonder what happened to the main thrust of the story, the tangled and complex relationships and inner psychological turmoils linking Katherine, Ralph, Mary, William and Cassandra. This is the crux of the novel.
Granted, Woolf was one of the intellectuals of her day, a bluestocking member of the Bloomsbury set, so she may well have related to the Cambridge University thread in another context. But it is not a part of Woolf’s narrative.
Gharavi chose to call the film ‘Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day’ but ignored most of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Night and Day’. Presumably Gharavi insisted on prefixing the title with the author’s name to imbue her film with an academic status that it does not merit. Virginia Woolf deserved better than this.
It's like comparing an episode of Tom and Jerry with Steinbeck's classic Of Mice and Men. They both contain a muroid rodent, to a greater, or perhaps to a lesser extent.
