Writer: Justine Waddell (adapted from Virginia Woolf)
Director: Tina Gharavi
An all-star cast largely in cameo roles appears to be this film’s major selling point, a disappointing and often narratively confused adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel about a female scientist trying to make her mark in Edwardian Britain. With too many subplots and not quite enough substance there is a feeling in Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day that the film has been plotted by committee as too many different voices pull the story and its characterisation in lots of directions at once, leaving the adaptation in a shallow and unsatisfactory state.
Middle class Katharine loves astronomy and spends her time studying, mapping the stars and conducting her own experiments when she makes an important scholarly discovery. But her traditional father wants her to marry while her scattered mother tries to complete a book she has been writing for decades. Pressed into a series of family obligations, Katherine decides to apply to Cambridge in the guise of a man knowing the academic community will never accept her true gender.
Justine Waddell’s film at 80-minutes is rather too short for all the storylines they try to include and the piece lacks coherent commentary as a result. It opens with Katharine disguising herself as a man to sneak into a vote at an all-male learned society who almost unanimously reject the proposal to admit female members – beyond the application to university, this disguise device is not used again. Running alongside this are Katharine’s own studies, beginning with a naked night swim in Hampstead Ponds (also never explained), lots of ruminating and an empowered rant at some fusty Cambridge dons who are caricatured beyond ridicule. The battle for recognition among female scientists in the 1910s is clear but Night & Day does nothing to really show the struggle, the mechanism by which this character protests her cause or why eventual and inevitable acceptance arrives out of the blue.
Instead, it gets lost in some cliched family nonsense about getting married and why family life is a more suitable occupation for a women, having Katharine engage herself to a dull and unsuitable man played by Jack Whitehall who is intellectually her inferior while conduction a flirtation with a German man who isn’t with no regard for the impending war, class or scandal that may bring. Here too the story becomes unnecessarily distracted by Katharine’s best friend Cyril who finds love with a man and comes out over Christmas lunch, much to Katharine’s surprise. Too little substance is given to all of these relationships and their contribution to an overall story that doesn’t know if it is about gender discrimination, family life or looking at the tragedy of hidden sexuality. So it ends up not being properly about any of these things.
Haley Bennett makes for an engaging lead, her expression a constant picture of gendered disgruntlement but the character is largely teary or annoyed so there’s limited range for the actor. There are a lot of cameos in small, ill-defined roles from Jennifer Saunders and Timothy Spall wasted as her indifferent and blustering parents to the otherwise excellent Frances Baber who gets barely more than a scene as a fellow academic.
By focusing on only a fraction of Woolf’s novel, only one perspective that seeks to compress the scientific and suffragette strands, means even the starry cast can’t make much of it.
Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day is in UK and Irish cinemas from 19 June.
