Modern classics – The Hours

Paula Fleri-Soler pays tribute to the film that celebrates the genius and the anguish of one of the world’s biggest literary female figures, Virginia Woolf.

“A woman’s whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day her whole life.”

The Hours is a classic example of many pieces coming together to create a perfect whole

So muses Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) as she sets about creating her masterpiece Mrs Dalloway, a novel that would become a literary classic and would be embraced for generations to come.

The novel is the thread that weaves through the film The Hours, released in Malta in March 10 years ago. Based in turn on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham, the film is the story of three women separated by decades, each searching for their place in the world.

Echoing the novel that inspired the book and film, The Hours looks at a day in the lives of these women. Woolf is living away from her beloved London in 1923 as she battles mental illness while writing Mrs Dalloway.

In 1951 Los Angeles, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) struggles with the ennui of her marriage to the staid Dan (John C Reilly). She reads Mrs Dalloway, and in Woolf’s words, finds an escape. And finally, in New York in 2001, Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) – a modern-day Mrs Dalloway – frets over the preparations for a party she is throwing for her best friend Richard (Ed Harris), a poet who is suffering from Aids.

The Hours is a classic example of many pieces coming together to create a perfect whole. Its source novel is a textured, multi-layered narrative inhabited by characters that are richly drawn; aspects that are seamlessly translated from the page to the screen thanks to David Hare’s incisive screenplay which captures every nuance in Cunningham’s book.

The performances by its three leading ladies are sublime – from Kidman’s Oscar-winning turn as the troubled Woolf; to Meryl Streep’s warm and human portrayal of Vaughn via Julianne Moore’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the unhappiness buried beneath the post-war American Dream – none of them put a foot wrong.

They are given ample support from a solid ensemble; all guided by the meticulous hand of director Stephen Daldry. The whole is underscored by some of the most evocative music to grace a film, courtesy of Philip Glass.

The design, especially the creation of the three different time periods in which the story unfolds, is an integral part of the film.

The Hours’ production designer Maria Djurkovic was in Malta in December to receive the European Production Designer award for her work on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. She spoke briefly about her work on The Hours, and was happy to answer some follow-up questions shortly after.

Djurkovic recalls her reaction on first reading The Hours. “I had just returned from a very hard shoot in Bulgaria and was looking forward to some time off when I received a call from Stephen Daldry, for whom I had designed Billy Elliot, saying that he was sending me the script for his next film The Hours, and that it was right down my street,” she says.

“I saw incredible potential in creating three separate worlds within one film, with such interesting, three-dimensional characters, whose environments I would have to bring to life.”

The Hours is the story of three women who exist in a different time and place yet are strongly connected to one another. How did Djurkovic go about creating those different eras?

“I realised that the challenge would not be in creating three different periods but finding a way of visually connecting these worlds into one aesthetic whole,” she explains. “The business of researching and creating a period is what I do. You need to use this knowledge as a foundation upon which characters are then built.”

Djurkovic goes on to explain that the characters themselves have a strong influence on her designs. “Creating the environment for each character, which is peculiar to just them, is every bit as important as creating a credible period. In addition to this, a visual aesthetic for the film needs to tie everything together.

“Woolf is the only one of the three main characters who actually existed, so her world was the obvious place to start.”

Djurkovic recalls that her best memories of the film include the fact that throughout the shooting of the Clarissa party scenes “we were forever refreshing the vast quantities of flowers in her apartment. The slightly less fresh ones came home with me and my house looked like a florists for about three weeks.”

Flowers are one of the motifs throughout the film that connect the three lives. Indeed, as Woolf tentatively writes the first line of her novel: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” The line is repeated by Laura Brown as she picks up the novel, and it is what Vaughn unconsciously echoes as she plans her party.

And, like Mrs Dalloway, as the three women reach the end of their day, they each find peace, in their own way, despite the tragedies that befell them and those yet to come.