Mrs. Dalloway (1997)

There is no safety from modern man's existential dilemmas, not even among the buffered, privileged denizens of post-World War I Britain's ruling classes. Long before a crew of coffee-stained French writers were proclaiming the futility of human endeavor, a mild-faced and highly polished English authoress named Virginia Woolf wrote a novel of isolation and despair so perfect in its depiction of bourgeois humanity's limitations that the book rendered any subsequent forays into these subjects pointless. Dutch director Marleen Gorris's Mrs. Dalloway (1997) is the cinematic adaptation of Virginia Woolf's tale of a politician's wife existing in the netherworld between a mourned past of valor lost and a future empty of everything but death. The movie is shot in a muted and somber reality, always conscious that its inhabitants are living in the approaching shadow of the second global conflagration.