Virginia Woolf’s interior epic “Mrs Dalloway” survives — and thrives — following a surprisingly successful transplantation from London to Lagos in brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri‘s vivid and velvety “Clarissa,” which places a superb Sophie Okonedo, radiant with melancholy, at the heart of its remarkably well-cast ensemble. Expanding in ambition and feeling from their promising debut “This is My Desire” (aka “Eyimofe”), the Esiris cast a perceptive eye over the elite social constellation that has fallen into orbit around this dutiful but unfulfilled society wife, and have nothing but compassion for her as she spins slowly around and around at its center: loved by some, resented by others, admired by all — and totally alone.
From the outside, however, it seems like Clarissa (Okonedo) is rarely alone, least of all on this busy day when she’s preparing for a party that evening in her gracious Lagos home. There are household staff to chide over crockery and meal prep, there’s a daughter to cajole into attending, there’s a husband, Richard (Jude Akuwudike) whose lapels need smoothing and there’s an artwork to be hung wrong in the living room, complained about and grudgingly rehung.
There is quite some domestic comedy to all this bustle, and Clarissa is wryly patient despite her exasperation. Yet in unguarded moments, there is a little tug of sadness to the corner of her mouth. Just as Woolf’s novel was revelatory in its depiction of a woman presenting an efficient and engaged face to the world while thinking and feeling a whole other way, so does the ever-watchable Okonedo deliver beautifully on Clarissa’s ability to bilocate, to be right here and present, but also somewhere very far away.
That faraway place is the holiday home of her youth, and one particular, lazy, hammocked summer of lake-swimming and alfresco dinners, when she was in love. Not just with her poet boyfriend Peter (played in the past by Toheeb Jimoh and in the present by David Oyelowo) but with herself, and the promise of everything the future might hold for a privileged, pretty, intelligent young woman hailing from an influential family. This Clarissa (India Amarteifio, astonishingly similar in appearance and manner to Okonedo) has a cluster of close friends, including Peter, Sally (played by Ayo Edebiri in her youth and Nikki Amuka-Bird when older) and the jovial Ugo (Kehinde Cardoso/Danny Sapani). They’re soon to be joined by the quiet but ambitious Richard (Jable Osai), who with his air of stiff studiousness is the diametric opposite of Peter, yet whom Clarissa will later choose to marry.
The film darts back and forth between the past in the countryside and the present in the city, between Peter-then as a smiling, ardent, occasionally argumentative lover and Peter-now, a respected writer returning from a lengthy absence to Nigeria and showing up unexpectedly in the middle of Clarissa’s busy day. He does not smile so much anymore. But maybe none of us do.
It remains endlessly remarkable, and a huge coup by casting director Nina Gold, just how well the younger castmembers mesh with their older counterparts. Even when the physical resemblance is not as striking as it is with Amarteifio and Okonedo, the continuity of sensibility — a little weather-beaten by the passage of time — means that even with the complicated flashback-and-forward structure, we are never unsure who anyone is.
Less well integrated, though compelling in its own right, is the present-day subplot about Septimus (Fortune Nwafor) a soldier in a corrupt unit of the Nigerian military, traumatised by the violent death of his commanding officer. Septimus is married to Aisha (Modesinuola Ogundiwin) which connects him obliquely to Clarissa as Aisha is the seamstress tasked with altering Clarissa’s clothes. But though he feels less of a part with Clarissa’s story than does his equivalent character — a shell-shocked WWI soldier — in the book, this strand does provide the Esiris with the material to make more trenchant observations about the Lagosian social divide. And it also gives DP Jonathan Bloom’s lovely, warm-grained 35mm cinematography a rich spectrum to observe, from Clarissa’s elegantly upscale house and her garden bursting with lush flowers and foliage, to Aisha’s cramped sewing room and the traffic and market stalls of central Lagos.
But all of the film’s many assets come back to rest on Okonedo, and on those moments between the big moments, when she stares with unfocused eyes out of a window, or takes a breath during which she arranges a face with which to face the world. The party begins and all these figures from her past arrive, alongside the cream of Nigerian society, represented by the imperious and slightly ridiculous Lady Maryam (Joke Silva) whose favor is being courted by Richard, a respected man of quite some importance who somehow seems meek next to his luminous wife.
Clarissa maybe feeling rueful, but her rewards for perfectly hosting this perfect soirée are no mean thing: like birdsong, the air here is filled with reminiscences and regrets, but in the reunion of the five friends there is also the opportunity to clear it a little. Had Clarissa made different choices back then, had she stayed with Peter or pursued her attraction to Sally or struck off on some path of achievement on her own, there’s no guarantee she wouldn’t just have a different set of dissatisfactions today. And so “Clarissa” doesn’t end so much as it suspends, on a note of reconciliation, not just with her old friends but with herself. Because no matter how splendid, how loved and how successful you become, at some point the world will start to look on you as just one thing. And it’s no crime to allow yourself the bittersweet luxury of remembering when you, and all the people you loved, could still have been anything.
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