Virginia Woolf seems to be having a moment in the movies. Soon, we will see Tina Gharavi’s new version of Woolf’s comic novel Night and Day; and now, Nigerian film-making brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri have brought to Cannes their interpretation of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, a seductively mysterious, languorous, melancholy drama with commanding performances and a great musical score. It is set partly in modern-day Lagos, whose ambient streetscapes are conjured up with style, and partly in the more bucolic Abraka in southern Nigeria, 30 years in the past.
It is essentially a film about life-choices, about the terrible inevitability of marrying the wrong person and yearning to make sense of the past without regret. The film moves with an easier and more unselfconscious swing than, say, Stephen Daldry’s Dalloway-themed movie The Hours from 2002. There is a smooth switch between before and after, sometimes using the time-honoured technique of a photograph taken in the past that is rediscovered much later by some of its now-older subjects.
