One of the most exciting movies playing during the Cannes Film Festival this year isn’t in the official lineup. Instead, “Clarissa” — a bold and wrenching adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” set entirely in Nigeria — is in Director’s Fortnight, the most prestigious of several smaller programs that run alongside the main event.
Independently run and housed in a theater several blocks from festival headquarters, this parallel event has a long history of showcasing new talent before the festival does. This is where the international film world first discovered Martin Scorsese, Chantal Akerman and Bong Joon Ho.
Since its premiere on Saturday, “Clarissa,” which stars Sophie Okonedo in the title role alongside David Oyelowo and Ayo Edebiri, has been rightly received with a chorus of wows. Directed by the filmmaking brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, the movie counts as one of the few genuine discoveries in what has been a generally lackluster year.
When I chatted with the Esiris on Monday, on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, they seemed happy if understandably a touch wrung out. Open and friendly (not everyone is during this demanding, carnivalesque event), they were eager to talk about all things cinema. Arie’s voice was husky from a cold, and he soon swaddled himself in a blanket. Their first screenings were over, but he was staying on, hoping to catch some movies, while Chuko was flying home later that day.
If the American distributor Neon has its way, you will be hearing much more about Arie and Chuko — as they are billed in the film — who are 40-year-old fraternal twins. (Neon hasn’t set a date for the theatrical release, but “Clarissa” will be in rotation on the fall festival circuit.) Written by Chuko, this is the brothers’ second feature following “Eyimofe (This Is My Desire).” That critically lauded drama, about two Nigerians hoping to better their lives by emigrating to Europe, had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020. It was there at a screening with a festival moderator, and shortly before the world started to shut down, that Arie first learned what he and his brother were going to direct for their follow-up project.
“Chuko just belted out, ‘We’re adapting ‘Mrs. Dalloway” for a contemporary Nigerian context,’ and I was just like, ‘Huh?,’” Arie said. “There was a huge audible gasp in the audience,” he added. “I was just like, ‘Well, OK, I guess that’s what we’re doing.’” The brothers laughed as they recalled that moment, and then shared that Chuko writes at a mahogany desk that he’s named Virginia. Arie elaborated that Chuko “literally does say things like, ‘I’ve got a meeting with Virginia.’”
A stream-of-consciousness novel published in 1925, “Mrs. Dalloway” follows its title character, a 52-year-old upper-class married mother, over a single day as she prepares for a party she’s hosting that evening. As the story shifts between the present and the past, it also moves between Clarissa’s external and interior worlds, slipping from the errands she runs to the newfangled machines in her orbit, the people she encounters and the memories that wash over her. Woolf mixes all this with the inner and outer beings of other characters, among them her old friend Peter and the traumatized Septimus, a tragically fated World War I veteran whom Clarissa never actually meets.
In her introduction to “Mrs. Dalloway,” Woolf wrote that once a book was published, it no longer belonged to the author but instead was committed to “the care” of the reader, who must decide what’s relevant to her or not. Chuko Esiri first read the novel, having plucked it off a shelf, while a teenager in a British boarding school. “I didn’t understand it, but I felt it,” he said, and returned to it several times, notably about eight years ago. By that point, he had received his master’s in film from New York University while Arie was getting his at Columbia, and he had changed, as had his understanding of the novel. “I just saw pieces of everybody I knew cached in these characters,” Chuko said, “and it just completely leapt out at me. ‘Oh, this could, would work.’”
There were other commonalities, most obviously colonialism. From the mid-19th century until 1960, Britain controlled Nigeria, and the countries remain deeply connected. (English is Nigeria’s official language.) Present-day Nigeria and England in the 1920s “are eerily similar,” Chuko continued, as he expanded on what he saw in Woolf’s novel, “specifically how conservative the cultures are.” This connection comes devastatingly to the fore in the film when Clarissa’s father berates a server for not wearing white gloves while waiting on her and her friends. The younger people had just been animatedly discussing Chinua Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart,” an anti-colonialist landmark, yet remain deferentially quiet during the abusive outburst.
By transposing the story to Nigeria the Esiris have foregrounded the colonialist history that surfaces in the book with its repeated mentions of India and, by extension, the British Empire. It’s a brilliant interpretive move, one that’s all the more powerful because of how the Esiris use Woolf’s narrative fragmentation to suggest this crushingly divided world. The young Clarissa grows up into a comfortably cosseted woman who lives in a large, waterfront house filled with servants. Unlike her father, Clarissa tends to smile at the people who do her bidding. Yet while she wears her privilege lightly, the weight of history presses down nevertheless. There’s pathos to how unknowingly Clarissa seems to drift along, but not an iota of sentimentality.
Arie Esiri focuses more on the visual elements of their filmmaking, and he only read Woolf’s novel after his brother had finished writing the script. After deciding to make the movie, they started watching films for inspiration, as is their custom, Arie explained, to understand their own ambitions for the project and how they would approach it structurally. They watched Michelangelo Antonioni, and spoke admiringly of Edward Yang’s “Yi Yi.” (Their first feature is in the Criterion Collection.)
The brothers shot “Clarissa” on 35-millimeter film, drawing talent both from abroad and from the robust ranks of Nigeria’s film talent; the country’s industry is one of the largest in the world. Most of the movie unfolds in Lagos, where a large construction project looms over her house like a threat from the future. The Esiris filmed the pastoral scenes of Clarissa’s past at a resort run by their father, a businessman turned fine-art painter. Their mother, a former lawyer, founded a library. The parents didn’t let the brothers watch TV when they were young.
The Esiris already have a sense of what their next movie will be. It’s based on a true story about servants who are accused of theft in the house where they work, an idea that Arie has been thinking about for some time. “None of them fess up to it,” he explained. “And then they hire a babalawo, which is ——” Chuko broke in, “a witch doctor.”
Throughout the interview, the brothers, amid thoughtful pauses and shared glances, effortlessly passed the conversational baton back and forth. At one point, we talked about the tricky logistics of sharing directorial duties and how on set Chuko tends to be the more social of the duo while Arie stays with the camera. This team approach has served them well and led to an acclaimed movie that from its first striking shot to its last, expresses a soaringly harmonious joint vision.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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