Review: Arie and Chuko Esiri’s ‘Clarissa’ at TIFF
It’s been an exceptional year for filmmakers transposing Mrs. Dalloway to modernity. The Tribeca Festival played host to The Last Day by Rachel Rose, a loose, impressionistic echo of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 classic. Meanwhile, Cannes and Toronto saw brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri expand on the story in a contemporary Nigerian setting with Clarissa, an invigorating film containing some of the year’s finest cinematic sleight of hand, and its most captivating performances.
Novelistic and abstruse, Clarissa—named for Woolf’s nostalgic middle-aged socialite, Clarissa Dalloway—unfolds with the very same stream-of-consciousness telling as the original text, a cinematic feat that is, by its nature, opaque. It yields, however, a cinematic vitality. Tracing the who’s who (and who’s when) of the flashback structure requires attention to details like casting and costumes, since the fleeting, casual dialogue mentions characters’ names only in passing, and the visual language is rarely aimed at creating connections between the timelines. The result, courtesy of Chuko Esiri’s immensely thoughtful scripting, is a lean-forward experience of unraveling knotty curiosities, which the movie’s ensemble brings to life in apparent vignettes slowly woven together—not just by the film’s own editing, but by our own synaptic connections, formed to fit the story into a familiar shape.
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CLARISSA ★★★★ (4/4 stars) |
Like the novel, Clarissa follows its eponymous fifty-something (played by Sophie Okonedo) preparing for a party over the course of a day, amid memories and chance encounters. Only the setting here is modern Lagos instead of 1920s London, a tilt-shift that requires little alteration beyond a few last names and some Nigerian Pidgin. Although the movie bides its time, a central scene nearly an hour in—following younger versions of each character gathered for a fancy luncheon—quickly crystallizes its themes of class and postcolonial identity, turning the very act of adapting an interwar English classic into a thorny perusal of the country’s complicated cultural inheritance, on par with Chinua Achebe’s great Nigerian novel Things Fall Apart.
The shadow of colonial Britain looms large over the movie’s telling, between its characters’ posh accents (which they note as a remnant of the crown) and the rigid hierarchies maintained and transformed to suit the status quo of power. However, these prickly hegemonies disguise character dynamics at turns passionate and conversational. In the present, Okonedo’s high-strung Clarissa alternates between genial and severe when instructing her staff, while several decades in the past (where she’s played by India Amarteifio), she comes off as a more thoughtful, bright-eyed character still on the precipice of hardening toward issues of class.
Her entanglement with a youthful intellectual, Peter (Toheeb Jimoh in flashbacks), has the lively, lived-in quality of a late-summer vacation, courtesy of Jonathan Bloom’s vibrant cinematography. This paves the path for a similarly tricky wistfulness when the older Peter (David Oyelowo), now married and living in the country’s north, happens to be in Lagos to wrap up his late father’s affairs when Clarissa learns of his visit and invites him to the party, albeit from afar. By delaying this reunion, the directors build anticipation through the aforementioned flashbacks—a tale of youthful naïveté on the verge of adulthood, and a more complicated world—eventually pulling the trigger on a moment of breathtaking silence, which Okonedo and Oyelowo sell like piercing arrows to the heart.
The Esiri brothers also re-fashion the book’s subplot about a shellshocked soldier into one of the modern Nigerian military tackling Boko Haram. Their version of Septimus (Fortune Nwafor), who ends up loosely connected to Clarissa by several degrees, becomes a flashpoint for contemporary cultural undercurrents surrounding militarism and masculinity. Although this analysis seems disconnected from larger musings on class and religion (Clarissa is also a tale of Muslims and Christians, and the spaces they occupy in Lagos), the saga of Septimus wraps back around in devastating ways. Its emotional ricochets ride up the political ladder we’re gradually introduced to, by way of Clarissa’s politician husband Richard (Jude Akuwudike in the present, Ogranya in the past), a fascinatingly aloof character.
Equally important centerpieces of this split timeline, and its split consciousness, are Clarissa’s reliable, jovial buddy Ugo (Danny Sapani/Kehinde Cardoso), and her estranged friend Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird/Ayo Edebiri), whose first meeting with Clarissa becomes the emotional fulcrum of the flashback scenes. In addition to unearthing and clarifying the novel’s queer themes, the movie also queers the form these moments take, transforming memories of Clarissa and Sally into haunting echoes of unrequited longing that fan outward, into enveloping sensations of regret.
In Clarissa, words and ideas are withheld, but keeping them close to the chest has the gradual effect of nudging them out of every orifice, and from between every cut. This yields a film of arch and deliberate construction, where emotional rhythms slide gradually into place, until silent exchanges are all you need to understand both the internal and external worlds these characters occupy. It’s as rich, observant and absorbing as any great book about identity, imbued with a lush cinematic splendor that makes every moment last a lifetime.
