Stephen Daldry
The Hours

"(Virginia Woolf) is a very fortunate woman. She has two lives: the life she leads and the life of the book she is writing" - Vanessa Bell

Three women. Three periods. Three noble spirits. One single, majestic intent: to allow Mrs. Dalloway to emerge from the coarse paper in which she was conceived. To empirically forge the stream of consciousness within very different contexts, inextricably bound in the positive grip of Virginia Woolf's work. A triangular-based pyramid: Mrs. Dalloway at the peak, followed by the anxiety and creative psychosis of its author, then the remaining ladies, ready to materialize from the bland abstract prose the life and work of an ordinary woman.

To export to antithetical environments the sudden drama vs. mocking everyday life of a day's twenty-four hours: here's where Virginia Woolf, almost magically, enters the heart of existence, at first glance commonplace and anonymous, of two reflective women, "ultra homine", intentionally or not thrown headlong into the revised and corrected plot of Mrs. Dalloway, the common denominator of the film.

One day only, a few hours, fast and fleeting moments, which, however, irreversibly change the souls of the "victims".

Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is the Mrs. Dalloway of the 1950s, an honorable wife and mother, in distress over a feeling of incapacity and mediocrity à la Zeno Cosini and/or Leopold Bloom, which almost alienated her from her world forever. Laura reads and becomes passionate about Woolf's work, grasps the continuous flow of "moments of being" of the human poised between light and darkness, hyperbolizes it and demotes it to the decay of the soul; suddenly denies her talents, the good wife and mother transforms into a petty and vile individual who must escape. And indeed, she escapes, leaves her home, the perfect conviviality of the Fifties, in panic finds refuge in a hotel. But she does not forget her companion Woolf-Dalloway, continues to read, to camouflage herself within the pages of this fateful novel. The hours are vain. They pass and she returns home, the once-inept woman, now a revitalized "angel of the hearth". And the hours pass, the flows volatilize.

Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) is a contemporary Dalloway, immersed 360 degrees in the chaotic routine of the Big Apple, intending to buy flowers for a party in honor of her friend (and former lover) Richard - who will be revealed to be the son of Laura Brown -, a homosexual poet afflicted by rampant AIDS, winner of a lifetime achievement award. Clarissa modernizes the Woolfian passions and stream of consciousness to the materialistic context of modernity, her allotted twenty-four hours alternate between sufferings, tears, and flashes of mystical light, the fear of darkness challenges the certainty of unassailable self-rational will. Nevertheless, the appointed day draws the veil of death over Richard, he throws himself from a window after deliriums and visions, death closes the shutters on the hours that will still be able to introduce a devastated and old Laura Brown, mother of the poet of moments.

Spiritual parent and mentor of these people, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), settled in the green estate of Bloomsbury (Richmond) together with her husband Leonard, dazzled by psychosis-neuroses, strives to complete the writing of her most famous novel, a very arduous task. Living with a disturbed rationality is not child's play: she wanders between her writing studio and the kitchens, greets with gentle coldness her sister Vanessa Bell with the daughters, runs to the station to return to London, a city that, paradoxically, had been more executioner than a salvific place for her. The wrinkled hands, perpetually stained by ink from the pen and imbued with cigarette smoke, will also write her ethical will, the last, dramatic, and straightforward words before drowning in the Ouse river. Death represents the true common factor of the human triad: the day dies, man dies, the degradable and material dies, but the hours continue to pursue Infinity.

The Hours. A succession of little scenes and events that from the amorphous everyday embrace the transcendental specialty of the single moment: it does not matter where you are, what you are doing, with whom you relate, it is the moment, rapid and unmistakable, that gives man the will to desire, the essence of being, the guarantee of existence as an autonomous and free entity. Life is an invisible flow of temporal microcosms, indefinite and indefinable, yet present and absolutely flawless.

"To look life in the face... always... and to know it for what it is... to love it for what it is... and then... to put it aside... forever, the years... forever, the love... forever, the hours." - Virginia Woolf

Stephen Daldry, The Hours. Based on the novel of the same name by Michael Cunningham, Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.