The Hours

It's my week of annual leave and though boredom fatigues me in a world shut down, it’s also sweet when you can sit my newly painted room at the top of a Victorian house, a storm brewing outside, to indulge in a film in the middle of the afternoon. It’s been on my list for many years, but never got round to watching ‘The Hours’. The title just seemed so fitting at a time when hours don’t slip by fast enough. In fact, it was just the grimness of the day and I just needed something to immerse myself in completely.

The Hours follows the lives of three women through different times in history; all centred around the plot and writing of Virginia Wolfe’s Mrs Dalloway. All three are living an existence, hours unfulfilled, wanting an escape, death beckoning.

The original novel has possibly one of the most iconic, beloved opening lines: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”. The character comes alive, we hear her voice ringing as she leaves her house, on a bright morning in June. Likewise, The Hours opens with a radiant Meryl Streep shopping at a swanky florist in New York; she is giving a party for his best friend. She has a girlish weakness for organising social events. It is not that she likes to mingle in a crowded room in fact; what she like is the thrill of the anticipation before a big event. The hours that separate her from the inescapable final disappointment.

I was particularly touched by Julianne Moore’s character, Laura, the 50’s housewife, trapped in her husband’s overwhelming and suffocating picture of family bliss. I can’t imagine anything worse than to be caged in somebody else’s notion of happiness; a nightmare wrapped in a dream. The pressure to not disappoint and disrupt the dreamer and the courage to be selfish.

The Hours conflates sadness, disappointments, love and human connections built up over lives lived. “I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.”

Everytime I read the quote, I want to cry, mourning the death of the once dreamer. Nostalgia is painful. Nostalgia for the possible is even worse. I guess that was what the characters felt, they had experienced happiness pure and true, expecting there to be more, only to be then left with the hours that proceeded….

However, the film about suicide is strangely life-affirming. The value of their lives is not just the monotony of those hours, but the life as a whole and all the love and feeling within it. All the things that make you alive.