First Impression

     When I heard that we would be watching a movie modeled after Mrs. Dalloway, I was really interested in how the directors would bring across the intimacy and complexity of the minds of the characters. I think that they did a good job with that, but I found other things in the movie either distracting or differing from my interpretation of the novel.
      First off, I found the music to be striking, but most of the time, completely missing the mark. Yes, it is very thoughtful and tense, but while reading into Clarissa's thoughts, I felt a more neutral aura for everything, and sometimes, rather peppy. I can see where such music would be ideal, as in the moments where Virginia Woolf is just sitting and thinking, as we can see that she is in some sort of dilemma that is not open to us. Music in films is a key carrier of feeling and emotion that cannot be narrated or simply told to the audience. And here, it seemed as the music kept adding more and more stress to the situations, and there was so much of it that I was just sitting there waiting for the characters to kill themselves by the middle of the movie. Every move was accented by stresses in the music that were never resolved. The minority of the pieces made everything more and more depressing while the tempo increased the drama and the tension. But the fact that there was no resolve really bothered my ear. Simply said, the music was over used and did not portray what I would think to be the more realistic and probable sense that it should have.
      Secondly, I liked and disliked the close plot lines of the three major stories. It was interesting how the same events and situations were carried through and adapted to the different years. But! It did get tedious when the scenes changed so quickly and if the trashcan appeared in one, it would definitely appear three scenes later in a different time and so on. Every time you saw something happen, you could expect that it would reoccur very quickly afterwords. Yet I have to give a lot of credit to the different interpretations of the same major story. The adaptations were very interesting and creative.
    And finally, something I did appreciate: the use of color schemes. First off, they matched the story and the music. Most of the time, they created really artistic scenes. That is as much as I will say on that as I want to develop this for a response paper. But overall, I think that the movie was mostly on mark with the book.

Least Favorite Character?

        Although I have mentioned that I do not have any favorites among the characters, I can definitely say that I have a least favorite persona, Lucrezia. I am not sure exactly why, but from the first time that we were let in upon her thoughts, I found myself just waiting for her segment to be over. Unlike the thoughts of all the other characters, there seemed to be no depth to her mind. It seemed as though she had a very stiff mind that only saw things through one perspective, incapable of any other perception. She seemed to be in eternal desperateness and always overly conscious of attention. There was no sense of her even trying to understand Septimus or trying to accommodate her mind to his. In fact, I would go as far as to say that her tone of voice seemed a bit whinny at times. The only time that I actually felt more sincere to her was right after Septimus's death, but I do not attribute so much to her narrative as just to the situation. But on the overall, I felt little appreciation for Lucrezia as a character, and I think that I would have most likely enjoyed the book more if her character was more in tone with the other characters. Yes, Clarissa and Septimus can be seen as the extremes of this spectrum of this mental complexity, but all of the other characters display at least some degree of it as well. But Lucrezia's character is really out of synch with everyone else as she is so superficial  and almost self-centered in a way about how she perceives everything around her that it roughens up the flow of the book. As a matter of fact, the blandness of Lucrezia's perspective really made her a really unmemorable character for me, and I do not remember much of what she had said or done. But on the other hand, maybe Lucrazie is set to be the stabilizer of the complexities of Clarissa and Septimus's minds. With out her, we would not be able to so easily see the extent of the mental depth that dominates the narrative. She alone points out all the other characters. Or, do they all stick her out? It now becomes a question of what is normal and what is not.

Main Character?

     I can not say wether I prefer one's story to the other's. They are both very similar, and their actions through the book have similar patterns. It is almost as if Woolf is experimenting, putting different people through the same routine and taking us through their minds and perceptions as they walk down the same street, or look at the same thing. I can almost see Woolf marking off points on a map and titling each section as "Subject 1 down Bond Street", "Subject 2 down Bond Street". In the end, the experiment's results are given to us to read and analyze, we are given the choice to sympathize and lean towards one character or the other, towards "Subject 1" or "Subject 2". However, as I read the different stories, I do not lean towards one or the other. They are different and at the same time, similar, and when reading Mrs. Dalloway, I give all of the different brought up characters a pretty much equal weight in the sense of how much attention I am willing to focus on them.
     At the very beginning of the book, I found it, in a sense, soothing to be so completely in Clarissa's mind, the feeling being almost natural. Therefore, everything that I saw through her eyes, and through her mind, seemed very in tune with my perception of her events. Well, vice versa more like. And then we get to Septimus's story, and once again we go deep into his mind as if we are supposed to be there, and everything seems so natural. Almost perfectly right, in a sense. Yes, their personalities and situations are different, but when I read over them, I do not see one of them as better or worse or more important than the other. Both have a romantic aspect to them that makes our being in their minds a very simple thing to do and get used to, and I find their thoughts very interesting. Clarissa has a stream of thought that is on and off passionate, taking our attention yet at the same time letting us know of whats going on around us so that we do not find ourselves too blind at any given instance. Septimus takes us away completely into his revelations, which, although he says he cannot feel, are very emotional. Where Clarissa gives us the, at the time, conventional knowledge of who is who around us, Septimus, almost as if on purpose, blurs out those people as much as he can. When I read over sections where he is thinking, I can imagine scenes where he is standing, for example, in the midst of crowds, and everyone is slowly loosing their focus and going fuzzy, where as he stands very clear cut and sharp, the walking people slowly blend into each other until all we can see is Septimus standing in a flowing stream. It is practically the inverse of the scene in the recent Sherlock Holmes movie where Holmes is sitting against a yellow wall with his eyes closed, plucking a violin, and all the cacophonous sounds of the day came back to him in his mind as the camera zooms in to focus on his face. I feel with Septimus, the image is similar, but Woolf's writing style just sucks me in and places me, already in agreement, into his mind. In fact, I think that no matter what was actually going on in his head, I would find him just as interesting as Clarissa.
   You are probably thinking that I wrote so much on Septimus, yet still am saying that they are equal in my mind, that is just the smallest bit contradictory. But the case just is that I cannot really explain what it really is that makes Clarissa's thoughts interesting to me.  They are just like flowing water. They go on and on, effortlessly avoiding obstructions, taking us swiftly down a new path. The thoughts of both Septimus and Clarissa flow equally as swiftly, carrying me away down the center of the stream, and if there will be a split in the road, I am yet to see which way the stream of thoughts will take me.