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.
Whether it finds many crowds to please remains to be seen. London-set and broadly accessible, “Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day” was a fitting opener for the second edition of the SXSW London multimedia fest, a few weeks ahead of its U.K. theatrical bow. But given its relatively low-profile source material and a solid cast of known names who nonetheless aren’t major big-screen draws, the film might fare better on streaming platforms internationally. For Iranian-born filmmaker Gharavi, who landed a BAFTA nomination for her punchy 2013 debut feature “I Am Nasrine,” this handsomely dressed and mounted production proves she can handle the demands of British heritage cinema, though it’s a less interesting direction for her.
