The Hours

I know it's New Year's Eve, but I gotta post this.

"To look life in the face, always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last, to know it, to love it, for what it is and then to put it away."  film quote

BBC2 has just shown the film, The Hours which I first saw back in 2003. I didn't have a blog then so I couldn't reflect on it ...

On the surface this is a film about the writer, Virginia Woolf and her fight against mental illness and depression; it's about sexuality and conformity explored in the lives of three women. But on another level it's about one character's realisation that her long years of blossoming happiness were merely a euphemism for one wonderful but finite moment in time; it exposes the superficial habits we construct to act out society's stereotypes; and it shows the intense, flawed and lonely people that we actually are.

Woolf faces the threat of her own extinction through madness. A mother abandons her children to leave an American Dream, one that is incapable of recognising her sexuality. A hostess struggles to confront her superficial life, as she sees the only meaning she's known, slipping away.

I can think of no other film that presents society's triviality in such bleak contrast to the intensity of our lives.

I love:

• that Nicole Kidman is virtually unrecognisable
• Philip Glass' mesmerising and hypnotic scoring of the soundtrack
• that everyone in this film acts
• the way these three separate, yet so directly connected lives intertwine
• that at least one reviewer really hates this film

Perhaps there can be no beauty in the absence of death? Perhaps this is a necessary fate, that those who are unable to conform must sacrifice themselves to our collective triviality?

"It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses."  Virginia Woolf