Thanks for the comments Buds! And, Mandy, I'm happy to hear that you like the movie so well too!
I agree that like BBM, multiple viewings are a good idea. Both movies are good upon first viewing, but after multiple viewings you notice more details and begin to see underlying themes, etc. better. Also, like BBM- it can be a really tough film to watch in that some of the themes are really sad or brutal. The overall narrative seems to be a combination of the really-lovely with jabs of sadness and sometimes unexpected brutality. The intersection of the Septimus (Rupert Graves) narrative with Clarissa Dalloway's is unexpectedly sad. It also seems to be a lot about the fleetingness of moments of happiness and learning how to recognize happiness and opportunities when they come up... to me these themes - fleeting happiness and opportunities taken or lost resonate a lot with BBM. The theme of short moments of happiness seems to be really foregrounded in the movie The Hours (also based on
Mrs. Dalloway).
And, Monika, I do recommend seeing the movie even if you couldn't get through the book... the movie, I think, is very helpful in making the narrative and the chronology of events in the book clear. Woolf's stream of consciousness writing style can be extremely confusing. Having just re-read the book the other week... my main observation is that it's almost better to approach the book as if it's a kind of poetry. So much of the book is driven by characters' inner thoughts/interior monologues as part of Woolf's interest in expressing of how thought processes happen throughout a person's day. It was really hard for me to imagine how they'd make it into a movie. The exercise of Mrs. Dalloway really is so interesting.. trying to really trace how memories and sometimes almost random associations are triggered by encountering certain things throughout one's day... and how one thought can lead to something unexpected and non-linear sometimes. The really difficult stream of consciousness writing style I think was a really smart style to use to try to express/emulate the complexity of how thought processes happen.
Woolf's command of language is so subtle and complex (there really isn't any other term that comes to mind but complex)... I think that she's one of the hardest 20th century writers to read. But, I totally love her... once you get into the rhythm of her writing it's really lovely and hugely profound. Virginia's nephew Quentin Bell (the son of her sister Vanessa Bell... I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant... the two main painters in the Bloomsbury group) once said that
A Room of One's Own is an example of Virginia "speaking" and her novels like Mrs. Dalloway are examples of Virginia "thinking" (I think he means her introspective thoughts vs. her public persona or way of expressing herself more conversationally). Yes,
A Room of One's Own was written originally as a lecture and is one of her extended polemical feminist essays, like her longer book
Three Guineas. She also wrote interesting literary/political essays like "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." But, her writing like that is so different in style from the novels.
