To look life in the face, to know it for what it is, to love it for what it is-is the right of every human being-Virginia Woolf

By now, everyone knows about “The Hours”, an “unmakeable” film based upon a Pulitzer prize winning novel by Michael Cunningham, starring three of this decades’ most acclaimed actresses- Nicole Kidman as the tormented novelist Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore as the unhappy 50’s housewife Laura Brown, and Meryl Streep as the contemporary, literary Clarissa Vaughan. The film takes place during one day in each of their lives-and a half century apart in time. Uniting their stories is the echo of the fictional Mrs. Dalloway, an imaginary character in the ground-breaking stream-of-consciousness novel by the same name, written by Woolf in 1925, read by Laura Brown in 1952, and lived by Clarissa “Dalloway” Vaughan, in the year 2000.

Essentially, this film is about women- not all women, though. Anyone living happily is not included here- but about certain women- the ones whose dreams and unfulfilled yearnings overwhelm their real-life circumstances- who cannot resolve their unhappiness even if they could understand it.