ABSTRACT
The Hours (2002) presents the stories of three women negotiating choices of whether to live or die. As a complex narrative, interweaving the women’s stories across the generations from the 1920s to the almost present day, the film explores the question of how to live in the face of intolerable physical and mental suffering. Using unconventional storytelling and cinematic techniques in order to depict consciousness and memory, The Hours takes Mrs. Dalloway’s existential concerns and elaborates them across the lives of Virginia Woolf, a 1950s housewife, and a contemporary party planner. The Hours challenges us to make sense of the allusions and links between the narrative strands and to understand the relevance to our own lives, leading us to ponder over the option of suicide and to make sense of the choice to die.
