The Hours (Full Screen Edition) [Import]

If possible, try to see it when you are not particularly sad, because the story in itself is pretty gloomy. It talks about depression, bleakness, suicide, sexual identity confusion and lack of purpose. The whole film is pervaded by hopelessness and ennui, and the melancholia is omnipresent.

On the other hand, Stephen Daldry (the director) somehow managed to achieve magnificently what previously seemed impossible: a movie based on Cunningham's book, "The hours". Where is the difficulty, you might ask (only if you haven't seen the movie)?. Well, the answer is in the plot of the film, based on three women: Virginia Wolff, Clarissa Vaughan and Laura Brown. They live in different times and cultures, but they share something: a feeling of vacuity, a total absence of matter,an all encompasing emptiness that threatens them... It is really beautiful to see how the film goes seamlessly from one woman's life to that of the other: there is a wonderfully perfect inconsistence that is only explained (and linked) at the end of the movie. You must pay attention, because the film, in order to link the story, shifts permanently forwards and backwards in time. However, that extra attention is compensated when at the last minutes of this movie you comprehend the meaning of the name of the film, and which is the link (besides those that are evident) between these sories.

Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman)is depicted as an intelligent woman battling against madness in the 1923 England, while she starts to write what will be one of her best novels, "Mrs. Dalloway"... Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a successful literary agent in the present, is planning a party for her former lover, who is now dying of AIDS. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a seemingly happy pregnant woman in 1949 Los Angeles, is trying to make a cake for her husband's birthday, while she starts to read "Mrs. Dalloway". Three women, three different lifes but something in common: how to fight against that we cannot touch, against depression, inner demons?.

"The hours" shines... Its light is rather dark, that is true, but it is incredibly good even for someone like me, who generally doesn't like dramas. It is not only a film, but a masterpiece...