Clarissa, a film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, was featured at the Cannes film festival and is expected to be released in the U.S. later this year.
The film transposes the story from London to a modern Nigeria. The Guardian’s film reviewer gives it four stars and describes it as:
a seductively mysterious, languorous, melancholy drama with commanding performances and a great musical score […] 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.
Starring Sophie Okonedo as an older Clarissa and David Oyelowo as an older Peter, the film premiered in Cannes earlier this month. Nigerian film-making brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri directed the film.
As an adolescent, Patrick Stewart was my hero because of his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I can go on for paragraphs about it, but it would be nothing you haven’t read before from other boys who grew up as science fiction enthusiasts.
My point for bringing up Stewart is his moving response to a woman’s question about domestic violence at a convention recently. Watch it here:
There are so many things to deconstruct and to focus on in this video, but what I found the most moving was the connection Stewart made to his father’s violence being connected to the shell shock he experienced as the result of World War II. Stewart goes on to discuss how men were supposed to just suck it up and be tough.
My mind immediately snapped to Septimus Warren Smith and how he changed upon coming home from World War I.
When I teach Mrs. Dalloway, which I have had the pleasure to do twice, sometimes my students have a hard time connecting to Septimus’ plight in the novel. They relate to Clarissa or Sally or sometimes both. Or the occasional dissenter finds neither particularly pleasurable, but many find difficulty with Septimus. They understand shell shock is like what we call post traumatic stress disorder, but many students choose not to focus their discussions, papers or research on Septimus. The second time I taught Mrs. Dalloway, this became very noticeable.
In the future, I am going to show them this video of Stewart talking about his own father. I think there is a real teachable moment there to make the connections better if they consider what he is saying in relation to what happens to Septimus in the novel or in their own lives.
Also, it is a means for bringing the novel into a modern context, which is an important part of my pedagogy. I think it is worth investigating.
