Multiple threads unfurl during the first hour of the elegant, incisive drama “Clarissa,” from directors Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri. Past and present are interwoven to introduce an ensemble cast of characters as they are now, who they were decades ago, their relationships to one another, and their place within Nigerian society. And then, halfway through, a yesteryear scene showing them all in their youth having a casual lunch coalesces what we’ve learned up to that point. The dynamic evinces both the interpersonal hierarchies and frictions among them and their privileged existence within a country in unceasing crisis.
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Bright and charismatic Clarissa (India Amarteifio as a young woman) scoffs at her friends for their dismissive opinions about Chinua Achebe’s landmark anti-colonialist novel “Things Fall Apart.” The book is one that plenty of American kids read in high school, as a prime and often sole example of African literature. Amid their argument over the text’s significance, Clarissa’s father scolds one of his employees for serving food without gloves. The exchange exemplifies the quotidian class disparity from which Clarissa and her friends benefit and about which they prefer to remain silent in that instance. They don’t approve of the patriarch’s abuse, but they are also not willing to challenge it. Whatever point Clarissa wished to make about Achebe’s book is instantly rendered hollow.
For their Lagos-set reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” the Esiri brothers cast Oscar nominee Sophie Okonedo as present-day Clarissa. As in the novel, the day of her birthday party and the preparations around it give the narrative its framework. Before she heads out to buy flowers, Clarissa orders her many employees around, perhaps with a kinder hand than her father, but still firm enough to assert her status. Over the course of this eventful day, she’ll reconnect with Peter (David Oyelowo), once an aspiring writer back in Nigeria, to deal with his late father’s affairs. Played by Toheeb Jimoh in the past, Peter had his head in the clouds and his romantic sights set on Clarissa, who didn’t reciprocate.
Though it may require added patience to become acquainted with these characters in their two distinct facets, given that “Clarissa” is a cumulative experience, the film’s impact is directly tied to the directors’ effort to give each timeline sufficient time to blossom. The personalities of the characters, including Sally, played with a playfully biting edge by Ayo Edebiri, and Richard (Ogranya), who eventually became Clarissa’s husband, ultimately feel fully formed, no matter which actor is playing them. A testament to excellent casting and performance, there’s a seamless throughline between each version of each character. Later, when Nikki Amuka-Bird embodies an older Sally, one can still perceive the cheekiness that Edebiri first brings to the role. Likewise, Amarteifio’s Clarissa and Okonedo’s more mature take both capture a similar allure that combines striking intelligence with comforting grace.
Adjacent to the opulence of the party planning and the revisiting of Clarissa and her friends’ memories is the life of Septimus (Fortune Nwafor), a once brightly spirited soldier in the Nigerian army, whose first-hand experience with a violent incident and the mental exhaustion that propelled it has turned him into a despondent body walking among the living. To transition between Clarissa’s enviable home by the water and Septimus’ humbler environment, the filmmakers capture shots of working-class residents in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest and most bustling city: merchants, manual laborers, and Muslim women praying.
The Esiri brothers make clear that in these less manicured settings, people face more challenging concerns. Their poverty and proximity to violence allow the wealthy to stay mostly oblivious in a parallel universe. Their harsher lives inevitably intersect with Clarissa’s through the services that people in these neighborhoods provide those like her. When Septimus eventually enters Clarissa’s home, he looks at himself in a mirror with inquisitive attention, almost as if recognizing himself as uncomfortably out of place. “Clarissa” is tacitly in conversation with last year’s “My Father’s Shadow,” a British-Nigerian production set in 1990s Lagos, as a watershed election approaches.
The unassumingly magnetic Okonedo radiates the assertiveness and tranquility of someone secure in her reality. Even as Peter, a specter from a distant past, comes to rattle her momentarily, she has no illusions of a different future. There’s something radically refreshing about her content acceptance and lack of idealism. At one point during the soiree, she decidedly tells Peter, “We all put our great furies behind us and settled.” Her statement, delivered amid bursting emotion she tries to contain, doesn’t sound like a lamentation, but a matter-of-fact adage.
Yet Clarissa’s apparent satisfaction can also read as cynicism, since it presumes that things are the way they’ve always been and that, despite any revolutionary ideas she and those around her may have entertained, in the end, they all landed where they were meant to be. No more, no less. Under that belief, no real change is possible. She married the more prosperous prospect, while the world put Peter in his place. The seductiveness of the filmmaking, with its delicate lighting and exquisitely unflashy compositions, may deliberately disguise the theme’s severity, but the sting lingers. As Clarissa dances the night away in a flowy gown tailored for the occasion, the world is still on fire out there. [A-]
