There's a new film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel about a headstrong Edwardian woman facing the grim prospect of marriage, and it's apparently decided that Woolf's subtlety was overrated. Directed by Bafta nominee Tina Gharavi and written by Justine Waddell, this version of 'Night and Day' takes a glancing reference to astronomy and blows it up into the entire emotional core of the story, because why let a little thing like authorial intent get in the way of a good metaphor? The result is a wayward, unworldly fantasia - a four-leaf clover of a film, or maybe five-leaf, if you count the wistful Germanic romanticism and the all-star cast including Timothy Spall and Jennifer Saunders.
Gharavi and Waddell have creatively gone against the grain of the novel, amplifying Woolf's single mention of stars into the heroine's central yearning. Cole Porter's lyrics to the song of the same title ('You are the one, only you beneath the moon, under the sun…') seem to have been playfully implanted as a subconscious memory. Thankfully - and one reviewer is very clear about this being a good thing - the film removes Woolf's supercilious condescension toward the self-betterment of the newly educated lower and middle classes. Instead, we get a sweet-natured story performed with conviction by the ensemble cast, interspersed with dreamlike set pieces. The result is not precisely Virginia Woolf's 'Night and Day'; it's more like E.M. Forster's 'Night and Day' or even Ronald Firbank's 'Night and Day' - which is to say, a different book entirely, but perhaps a more palatable one for modern audiences.