Breaking Baz @ Cannes: How The Filmmaking Esiri Brothers & Sophie Okonedo Put ‘Clarissa’ In The Spotlight
When twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri decided to adapt Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway and give it the title of Clarissa, her Christian name, they say they were “freeing her” from being someone’s property, someone’s wife. It’s as if…
When twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri decided to adapt Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway and give it the title of Clarissa, her Christian name, they say they were “freeing her” from being someone’s property, someone’s wife.
It’s as if the character has been freed from the shackles and allowed to be herself.
“That’s the idea, for her to be a person more than Richard’s wife,” says Chuko, referring to the name of her husband.
Sophie Okonedo plays Clarissa as a contemporary woman in present-day Lagos, Nigeria, and she seems more independent than how she’s characterized in the novel which is set in the years following the end of World War I.
Chuko notes that Nigerian households are a “deeply patriarchal society, and it falls on the women of the house. They run the house and there’s a great history of Nigerian women being the ones that move things forward… I think a lot of that is having grown up in a house and houses and seen our aunties and our mothers, like they run everything,” Chuko says as I collapse laughing because I know this to be one hundred percent fact.
The film played like gangbusters in Directors’ Fortnight. Neon was all over it long before it was announced for Cannes.
Mrs. Dalloway became Chuko’s favorite novel when he was aged 16 or 17.
“It’s a novel I love. I was at school, but it was not for school. Our mum’s a voracious reader and really instilled reading. Every home we lived in, there would be a room, and it would be where her book collection is, and that continues to grow and grow and grow. I think maybe, we were doing modernist literature. I think we were reading Katherine Mansfield short stories at the time and I love those. And naturally it’s like, well, I want to read more of this sort of thing and found my way to Virginia Woolf and into Mrs. Dalloway. And what I always say is that, at 17, I didn’t understand it, but I felt it.”
What was it he felt? “The writing is so beautiful and the emotions are so strong, and in your late teens, your emotions are naturally already very strong.”
Chuko came back to the book when he was in his mid 20s and he had a “great love for it.”
The last time he read the novel for leisure was eight years ago, in his early 30s, at a time when he was on track to becoming a filmmaker, “and you’re also at this quarter-life crisis place and also coming out of film school as well. It’s like, well, there’s no more school to hide in. So I guess I have to make life work. And then you start thinking about, did I make the right choice? Should I have done this? And growing up in a Nigerian household, it’s doctor, lawyer, architect, and our friends are doctors, lawyers, architects and finance guys. There’s my friend buying his first house, and it’s like, I’m still living at home with mum. Life feels like a sitcom. It’s like 33-year-old living at home with his mother and hasn’t really got gainful employment. So, all these things are happening. And then reading the book, not that the book is about that, but it then just became much clearer. I was like, ‘Oh, there are pieces of me in these characters,'” Chuko says.
The brothers were now of an age where, as Chuko notes, “you start speaking more to your uncles and aunties and your parents. And Nigeria being a very unofficial gerontocracy, the elders are not to be disturbed, and they don’t share their lives. But at that age, they feel a bit freer with sharing their life with you, and in the book it’s like, ‘Oh, this is some of the stuff my uncles and aunties went through.’ And it just became really, really, clear at that point.”
I turn to Arie, the other brother, and ask when he first became aware of Woolf’s novel.
“Honestly,” he responds chuckling, “when Chuko decided that this was going to be the next film that we’re going to make—Virginia Woolf was on his Mount Rushmore of authors. The desk that he writes at is called Virginia. Virginia’s engraved on the side of it. So I could see it coming. So for me, honestly, it was when he said, ‘Look, I’m thinking of adapting this and making this our next film.’ Then I started considering her work, and well, mainly obviously Mrs. Dalloway, and I fell in love with the very prose-y visual aspects of the book, and one of the things I said to him was like, ‘This is going to be very difficult to do.'”
From “day one,” their instinct, says Arie, was to extrapolate the tale and set it in contemporary Lagos.
He reasons that “we talk about classic Russian literature feeling like the world in which that takes place, feeling like modern day Nigeria with the way our society functions and still functions.”
Chuko goes on to suggest that Nigerian society is “very conservative” and that “the family sort of runs as a mini government,” a comment that elicits guffaws. “There’s a council of elders that are, I don’t know, the House of Lords,” while “cousins or the next generation above” are the members of parliament. “It really does feel like a period drama. Well, one of the things we said when we started working and speaking to people is, ‘I don’t know why in the UK in particular, they don’t have more African directors making period pieces because it’s just like, wait, we know this.’
“There was something about this novel that was very contemporary, even being a hundred years old as of last year, and that was really appealing,” Chuko adds.
While setting it in a modern day Nigeria—although there are story strands set in the past—they’ve also been able to incorporate aspects of the country’s history and its colonial past.
Approaches were made to Sophie Okonedo, and it helped that Jude Akuwudike, who’d worked with them on their 2020 film This is My Desire, knew Okonedo from their time studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
That coincidence was a welcome surprise for Okonedo.
Also, says Chuko, “The idea of Jude being of Nigerian heritage and working in the UK all his life in her orbits, seeing him transpose his talents to his ancestral roots and imbibing by being this character in such an organic way was something that appealed to her. I think for her it was just like, ‘Oh, I would love to go on that same kind of journey,’ not just for artistic reasons, but very personal ones. The idea of doing something just spoke to her personally, but she didn’t know at that point we were adapting Mrs. Dalloway.”
Okonedo expressed as much to me when we first spoke about Clarissa. So keen was she, that even when the project was on the verge of collapse—more than once—she willed it to survive.
“That energy persisted throughout,” Arie says, smiling.
The trickiest part of the adaptation, says Chuko, was letting go of the book, and that didn’t happen until Theresa Park, who’s the lead producer, came on board and was the first person to read a presentable iteration of the draft “and came back with a set of notes and she was really like, ‘You can let go of the book now.'”
That gave them permission to jettison a lot from those early drafts, which allowed Chuko a firmer understanding that “I was writing a Nigerian Mrs. Dalloway. So, they share things, they share pasts, similar pasts, they share their society with the desire to throw a lovely party, and they’re very particular about the party and who comes and who doesn’t come. But she’s Nigerian so she’s inherently different,” Chuko suggests.
He surmises that Mrs. Dalloway from the novel and Clarissa in the film are cousins, really. “There were moments when I would have lines lifted out of the book in some of the characters’ mouths, and it didn’t feel right because I’m like, ‘I can’t imagine this person saying this,'” Chuko explains.
“So, that’s the first change that happens ,and then it’s like, leave the book behind, and so, left it behind completely, and then it morphs into something else. And yeah, I think that the ambition with adaptation is to maintain the spirit. It’s not supposed to be a certified copy. It needs to keep the spirit of the thing alive,” Chuko adds.
Indeed, and that spirit also shines through in the sense of the class aspect. There’s a moment when a former general upbraids a footman for not wearing gloves to serve food. It goes without saying that I would never behave in such a manner, but I remember observing much grander relatives behaving like exiled rulers, which, actually, they were.
