Fridae

It goes to show how great an artist is, if her body of work is unclassifiable. Virginia Woolf, with her unique stream of consciousness style, was one such artist whom eventually exasperated theoreticians shucked away under the intellectually lazy “postmodern” label. Now, even though Woolf’s novels were about middle-class families, desperate housewives, gender-switching immortals, the role and everyday experience of women featured the Big Questions about identity and being (“Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going?”), there is never a doubt that her protagonists had a strong, unshakeable sense of self.

It is so easy to imagine Pippa Lee as a protagonist in an adaptation of a hypothetical Woolf novel, a housewife navigating the eddies of the memories of her past as she drowns in the respectable present – or in her own words, is “having a very quiet nervous breakdown”. Yet this is one protagonist who we learn, isn’t even sure of the coherence of her own being – leading to the private lives of the film’s title.

There is, to be sure, a secret life that is hidden even to Pippa Lee, an entire life she leads as she sleepwalks for a third of her life. There is the private childhood of Pippa, the daughter of a very scary, drugged out mother perpetually high from speed; the short, educational summer of Pippa the teenager who stays with her lesbian aunt; the courtship and taming of wild child Pippa Lee in her Greenwich Village years; and the Pippa Lee, desperate housewife story.

Miller’s screenplay, switching from private life to private life, achieves a sense of existential uncertainty and ego-questioning that Woolf would have killed for. While the film rings emotionally true, it still manages to entertain with its strange and sudden switches in mood. Yes, there is a heavy meditation on the epistemology of the self, but that is mediated by a playful exploration of multiple genres and styles of storytelling.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is a coming of age story (of both a teen and a middle-aged woman!), a women in trouble drama, a suburban angst film, a quirky comedy, and a very sappy romance, all at the same time. And I think Ms Woolf would have approved.