Virginia Woolf seems to be having a moment in the movies. Soon, we will see Tina Gharavi’s new version of Woolf’s comic novel Night and Day; and now, Nigerian film-making brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri have brought to Cannes their interpretation of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, a seductively mysterious, languorous, melancholy drama with commanding performances and a great musical score. It is set partly in modern-day Lagos, whose ambient streetscapes are conjured up with style, and partly in the more bucolic Abraka in southern Nigeria, 30 years in the past.
It is essentially a film about life-choices, about the terrible inevitability of marrying the wrong person and yearning to make sense of the past without regret. The film moves with an easier and more unselfconscious swing than, say, Stephen Daldry’s Dalloway-themed movie The Hours from 2002. There is a smooth switch between before and after, sometimes using the time-honoured technique of a photograph taken in the past that is rediscovered much later by some of its now-older subjects.
Sophie Okonedo plays Clarissa; the title removes that patriarchal surname, a subject that is a bone of contention for her younger self and younger friends. In the present day, she is an elegant and stylish middle-aged woman whom we see organising a party for the evening at which she will be reunited with friends – and some who, once upon a time, were more than that. She lives in a handsome Lagos house with servants whom she treats firmly but not cruelly – unlike her late father, who thought nothing of humiliating them in front of young Clarissa and her contemporaries. She is married to Richard (Jude Akuwudike), a decent but dull man who works for Shell, a fact that, for Clarissa, given the anticolonialism of her youth, may constitute a persistent dull ache of disillusion.
Her guests for the evening include Peter (David Oyelowo), a failed writer who was deprived of his muse, his wellspring of inspiration and indeed the love of his life when he was in his early 20s, having enjoyed some early success with his poetry. Peter now dresses with a certain fussy, worldly panache, which we see is intended to cover up his fatal sense of lifelong disaster. Also arriving is Sally, played by Nikki Amuka-Bird, who is the mother of a young boy, a role she may not have envisaged in her youth.
Flashback scenes at Clarissa’s parents’ family estate in Abraka show us the younger Peter (Toheeb Jimoh), a handsome, talented guy who is enjoying what appears to be a secret passionate affair with Clarissa under her parents’ roof; she is played with marvellous delicacy by India Amarteifio, who conveys the complexity of her situation. She is attracted to Peter but also in two minds about how she feels about him generally – and if her reservations include being unconvinced about his literary talent, then this, for Peter, adds a further sting to what happens later.
We also meet the younger Sally, terrifically played by Ayo Edebiri, who is a charismatic and subversively sexy presence; she is clearly attracted to Clarissa and Clarissa feels the same way, or at any rate is willing to experiment tentatively with this feeling. Perhaps, though, she is too sobersided to explore the liaison very far and maybe the sudden, fateful coincidence of Peter and Sally in her life has had a self-cancelling effect; she cannot commit to a passionately realised version of her self. Nowadays, Clarissa keeps up with those friends with whom she has no painful history, and who are also friendly and gallantly supportive to Clarissa’s imperious widowed mother, Maryam, formidably played by Joke Silva.
The story of Clarissa past and present is significantly bisected with that of a troubled soldier, Septimus (Fortune Nwafor); his wife works as a seamstress for Clarissa, while Septimus is being treated for depression and PTSD by a therapist who is married to one of Clarissa’s friends. There is also, at a further remove, a kind of indirect psychic connection in that Clarissa’s father was a high-ranking army officer. Septimus is deeply affected by his close relationship with his staff sergeant, whose tough military bearing he admires – but this staff sergeant is himself unsettled by his contempt for the platoon’s commanding officer who is sending them out to engage the enemy, the terror group Boko Haram, with insufficient ammunition. We see boxes of ammo being corruptly sold, loaded into the back of a civilian car, perhaps bound for Boko Haram itself – which causes tensions that erupt into traumatising violence.
How does this terrible outcome affect the group? Does Septimus somehow function sacrificially? Has his sadness intuitively connected with theirs? It is an enigma that does not tie up neatly, but perhaps the shock that Septimus provides allows Clarissa and, perhaps, the audience, to register the first-world problems they are experiencing in the developing world. Septimus is a ghost who haunts their past and present lives. The Esisis have created a seductive, mesmeric picture.
• Clarissa screened at the Cannes film festival.
