‘Clarissa’ Review: Sophie Okonedo and Ayo Edebiri in a Sharp and Stirring Nigeria-Set Take on ‘Mrs. Dalloway’

With its stream-of-consciousness style and fragmented perspectives, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a beguiling novel with understandably few adaptations. Marleen Gorris tried with her shaky 1997 film starring Vanessa Redgrave as the titular protagonist and Rupert Graves as the tragic Septimus. A film inspired by a book inspired by Woolf (Michael Cunningham’s The Hours) followed, and a handful of stage adaptations came and went. Now, Arie and Chuko Esiri, the twin brothers behind the critically acclaimed drama Eyimofe, attempt their own translation — and how lucky we are for that.

Premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, Clarissa is a compelling interpretation of Mrs. Dalloway that transposes the action of Woolf’s novel from 1920s London to present-day Lagos. Clarissa, played with terrific restraint by Sophie Okonedo, is now a Nigerian society woman preoccupied by the infamously jammed Lagosian traffic, interactions with her housekeepers, and memories of youthful summers spent debating the meaning of democracy in Nigeria and the intellectual and political priorities of a developing nation-state.

Septimus (Fortune Nwafor, a revelation) is an off-duty military officer who has just returned from fighting the insurgent group Boko Haram in the northern region of the state. He struggles to fend off thoughts of conflict (ongoing since 2009) and anchor himself to his present-day reality, one in which he’s happily married to Aisha, a well-regarded Muslim seamstress (Modesinuola Ogundiwin).

The Esiri twins combine this new framework with a poetic register that has become increasingly popular since their feature debut premiered in Berlin six years ago. Clarissa embraces the cinematic grammar employed by filmmakers like Raven Jackson (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt), Savannah Leaf (Earth Mama), RaMell Ross (Nickel Boys) and most recently Akinola Davies Jr. (My Father’s Shadow). Similar to the films by these directors, Clarissa revels in the splintered language of memory. Jonathan Bloom’s gorgeous cinematography (the film was shot on 35mm) and Blair McClendon’s disciplined editing display an intuitive understanding of the source text, finding rhymes and echoes in close-ups of a lip touching a knee or a kingfisher bird crying from a branch. Kelsey Lu’s spectral score threads these images together, adding to the dreamy quality of the film.

Clarissa begins on a slightly different note than Woolf’s novel. The Esiris (the film was directed by both but the screenplay was written by Chuko) eventually get to the flowers, but first they offer the image of a young Clarissa (India Amarteifio of Netflix’s Queen Charlotte) sneaking out of the room of young Peter (Industry’s Toheeb Jimoh). It is 1994 and the pair, along with other friends, are in Abraka, a verdant town in southern Nigeria’s Delta state. Their days are spent swimming in the lake, picnicking by the beach and debating poetry and literature. At the sound of morning prayers, an older Clarissa awakens from this dream and shuffles out to her lawn, where the leafy bush has been replaced with the industrial skyline of Lagos. So begins her day. The flowers must be procured, the tents put up in the garden, and the finishing touches added around the home before her guests arrive.

As Clarissa meanders through Lagos, a portrait of the bustling West African city emerges. Just as in their debut, the Esiris luxuriate in scenes of people at work and observations of an increasingly cosmopolitan locale, subtly revealing trenchant class differences. Nowhere is that more apparent than with Septimus, whose story comes to us in potent fits and starts. When looking at his Lagos, the camera often closes in, reflecting the kind of claustrophobia poverty tends to engender. Septimus lives in a small apartment with his wife, travels by danfo (communal minibuses) and struggles to acclimate to civilian life after a traumatic tour in the North. Just as Mrs. Dalloway sought to reveal how Britain abandoned veterans, Clarissa gestures at the power and collateral damage of Nigeria’s military. Nwafor, who starred in Eyimofe, is astounding; in his hands, Septimus becomes a heartbreaking symbol of a nation’s broken promises. His performance lives in his eyes, which manage to convey a sincere naïveté and a sullenness all at once.

While Clarissa’s life seems more expansive — wider shots accompany her thread — it is also chillier. Okonedo captures that steeliness well, communicating the oppressive nature of the character’s life within the context of Nigerian society. Clarissa married Richard, a respectable and doting man in politics played by Jude Akuwudike, but she still thinks of her former lover Peter (played in the present by a fine David Oyelowo) and the intensity of her relationship with Sally (played by Ayo Edebiri as a youth and Nikki Amuka-Bird as an older woman). The only person she seems to still be in touch with is Ugo (Danny Sapani), whom they all used to lightly tease and who now operates as a kind of town crier, offering news and gossip alike.

In flashbacks, an attraction blooms between a young Clarissa and Sally. Amarteifio and Edebiri have an understated chemistry that makes the covert passion between these two women believable. To Clarissa, Sally represents an effortless cool — a composite of countercultural standards that she secretly wishes to embody. While there’s an understandable obliqueness to their relationship, one does wish that the filmmakers had afforded more space to their intellectual sparring. There’s something alluring about Sally, who’s never far from a cigarette or a book, and how her beliefs counter Clarissa’s traditional ones. Some of the best scenes in Clarissa are when the young friends gather around the table to debate the state of postcolonial literature and the irony of a newly democratic nation under military rule.

There’s a radical bent to the Esiris’ interpretations of and deviations from Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf wrote the novel to reveal the madness of a post-war society and the disjointed nature of a nation undergoing significant change. And for all the ways she sharply articulated the oppressed condition of women, she also relied on a colonial framework and deployed racist tropes. A sly achievement of Clarissa is in how it not only acknowledges this history, but upends it too.