The Hours

The Hours is a beautiful and thought-provoking drama about women's lives across time and place.

In a small English provincial town in 1923, the writer Virginia Woolf begins her novel "Mrs Dalloway" while struggling with her own inner demons. In a completely different place and a completely different time, in sun-drenched California in 1951, a sense of desperation grows in Laura Brown, whose life as a stay-at-home housewife feels increasingly meaningless and claustrophobic.

The third strand of the plot takes place in present-day New York, where the middle-aged lesbian publishing editor Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway, is preparing a celebration for the gay writer Richard Brown, who is ill with AIDS. During the preparations, memories well up in her from the time when the world still seemed full of possibilities, and she and Richard loved each other as lovers do.

There are many parallels between the three strands, but naturally there turns out to be a more direct connection.

As in "Mrs Dalloway", the action spans one day in the three women's lives. The beginning of the film is exemplary in its effortless cross-cutting between the three stories, which complement each other thematically and are eventually woven together into one story: a story that is, among other things, about daring to embrace life.

Having read Virginia Woolf's classic gives the film an extra dimension, in terms of both form and content, but you can easily watch this moving and intelligent film without any prior knowledge.