It’s the Fourth of July in “The Last Day,” and the weather is playing ball: the kind of soft, slouchy summer heat made for a leafy garden party. But a chill runs through Rachel Rose‘s elegantly restrained, internalized character study. It crisps the edges of the film’s immaculately lit frames and causing its two principal characters, tautly played by Alicia Vikander and Victoria Pedretti, to stiffen slightly, unable to give themselves over to the day’s balmy mood. Both are mothers, and holiday or not, there’s much to be done: caterers to organize, groceries to buy, pediatrician appointments to keep, meds to take. But Rose’s film isn’t a standard portrait of domestic discontent, grasping instead at something harder and less tangible to articulate: the sense that you’ve slid out of step with your own life.
“The Last Day” is the second adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” to premiere in as many months, though Rose’s riff is even looser than Chuko and Arie Esiri’s excellent, Lagos-set “Clarissa,” which just bowed at Cannes. The films are sufficiently different in concept and narrative direction that their shared source material shouldn’t pose a commercial impediment to either: It’s merely a testament to the philosophical precision and complex feminism of Woolf’s 1925 novel that it has inspired two persuasive contemporary interpretations over a century later. (A third Woolf adaptation, the Haley Bennett-starring “Night and Day,” premiered earlier this month at SXSW London; perhaps a full revival is in swing.) With its polished craft and finely controlled lead performances — with Vikander in one of her strongest vehicles since her Oscar win a decade ago — this Tribeca premiere should secure select arthouse distribution.
Rose is a visual artist known for her sensorially-led video installations examining the human condition and its relationship to the natural world. Though it takes a more conventional narrative form, “The Last Day” is consistent with that work in style and scope, beginning with its entrancing opening shots of a mother doe and her fawn in the woodlands of upstate New York — at peace in an environment of verdant, whispering bliss, before being violently connected to our realm. Eric K. Yue’s lush cinematography is sharply attuned to light and texture — the streaks of sun on an animal’s fur, blind spots of deep green shadow in the forest — while equally exacting sound design isolates and distorts what is natural and ambient, making it uncanny.
Yards away, Julia (Vikander) leaves her imposing colonial house to begin a day of errands and appointments, ahead of the large Fourth of July gathering that she and her husband throw annually. There are macarons to be collected and botox to be touched up; there’s also a dreaded meeting in the city with a literary agent (Marin Ireland), pressing for a follow-up to the popular book that Julia published a decade ago. What Julia is loath to tell her is that she hasn’t written a word in years, with marriage and motherhood having largely, not entirely happily, consumed her time of late, alongside the recent death of her father.
Today, the party gives her a clear purpose and objective, a semblance of a life in order. Zoom out a bit, however, and she’s clearly but quietly adrift. The pretense is hard to maintain when she bumps by chance into an ex, fellow writer Peter (a brief, melancholic turn by Wagner Moura), with whom she’s never quite made her peace. And it’s only in her scene with Peter that Vikander’s brittly serene performance — all tellingly tight smiles and effortfully tamped-down reactions — is permitted, briefly and tantalizingly, to flare into anger.
In a parking lot, she picks up a wallet accidentally dropped by a stranger, finds an address inside, and add returning it to her to-do list. The wallet’s owner, Taylor (Pedretti), doesn’t even notice it’s missing, between the various stresses of her day and the demands of her two young children. Even before a scene with a doctor that spells it out, Pedretti’s performance — at once raw-nerved and a million miles away — makes clear the disoriented, hollowed-out effects of postpartum depression, and her frustration at being gently managed by those around her, without being altogether understood. And so her day unfolds, like Julia’s, in an outwardly uneventful fashion that nonetheless points to a personal breaking point, all the more alarming for having no set timer on it: The fire-station test sirens that increasingly slice through the soundtrack strike an eerie, baleful note.
Some viewers may be frustrated at the lack of narrative fireworks here, even as the film climaxes with an ironic, feverishly edited display of Independence Day pyrotechnics. The two women’s arcs collide only glancingly, and there’s no sense of either joint or individual catharsis on offer as the story ends, if anything, more elusively than it began. But that air of unsettled, unidentified tension is crucial to Rose’s study of lives in passive crisis, nominally holding things together while fading away on the inside. Some fortunate people may leave “The Last Day” feeling that nothing much happened in it at all; others will be raddled, like Julia and Taylor, with searing feelings they can’t or won’t name.
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