film ---- mrs dalloway
- 1997 -

Clarissa Dalloway sets out on a beautiful morning; she's shopping for flowers for her party that evening. At the same time in London, a young man is suffering from a nightmarish delayed-onset (the year is 1923) form of shell-shock. Clarissa's nearly-grown daughter is distant, and preoccupied. In the course of one day, Peter, a passionate old suitor, returns from India, there is a suicide, Clarissa relives a day in her youth (and her reasons for her choice of a life with the reliable Richard Dalloway).

London 1923. Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party that evening. While the maid is preparing the house, Mrs. Dalloway is going to buy the flowers. On her walk through London she thinks about her youth when she and her friend Sally lived with there parents in Bourton (rural England). There she had a friend Peter Walsh who wanted to marry her. Although she loved him she decided not to marry him but to marry Richard Dalloway. Peter Walsh came back the day before out of India and later that day he calls at her house to talk with her. They still feel a lot for one another. And the rest of that day they both think of the time in Bourton. We also follow Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of the great war (WOI). This war gave him a very traumatic experience which lead him to kill himself. Then the party starts and she doesn't like it until the party seems to turn right after all.

Natascha McElhone and Vanessa Redgrave take turns in the role of Clarissa Dalloway.

Academy Award winner Marleen Gorris' newest film "Mrs. Dalloway" is an adaptation of the celebrated stream-of-consciousness Virginia Woolf novel about a woman's thoughts preparing and attending a party. For many Woolf fans, adapting this breakthrough book is sacrilege, but Gorris, renowned for her early feminist films, "A Question of Silence" and "Broken Mirrors", manages to get inside her characters in a uniquely cinematic way. Vanessa Redgrave stars as the famous protagonist and the screenplay adaptation was written by Eileen Atkins.

In 1996, director Marleen Gorris, who hails from the Netherlands, entered the international spotlight when her 1995 feature, Antonia's Line, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. Now, two years later, Gorris' follow-up to that much-lauded effort has arrived in the form of Mrs. Dalloway, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's classic novel. Because of its strong leading character and female-oriented themes, it's easy to understand why the film held such appeal for an avowed feminist like Gorris. In conjunction with Vanessa Redgrave, the director paints a probing-but-flawed portrait of a thoughtful woman.

Redgrave, who brings depth and a sense of poignant longing to Clarissa Dalloway, was instrumental in getting this picture made. After canvassing Virginia Woolf's body of work in preparation for a stage role, Redgrave was struck by the potential cinematic quality of Mrs. Dalloway, and suggested to screenwriter Eileen Atkins that it would make a good movie. Several years later, the film has traversed the road from concept to feature, and, six months after making its debut at the 1997 Toronto Film Festival, it is opening in selected theaters across North America.

Mrs. Dalloway is a "day in the life" motion picture that uses flashbacks to broaden the time span from a single day in June 1923 to a lifetime. The film begins by introducing viewers to Clarissa Dalloway, the upper class wife of Richard Dalloway (John Standing), a wealthy Member of Parliament. Clarissa, who lives a life that is safe, isolated, and dull, is planning a gala party for the evening, where guests of stature will mix and mingle, telling boring stories and engaging in stuffy conversation. Clarissa is well-known for her parties, and they have become social events in London society. Then something happens to shatter the stillness of Mrs. Dalloway's life -- a man named Peter Walsh (Michael Kitchen), an old flame from 30 years ago, shows up on her doorstep. This leads Clarissa to think back to the choices she made during the summer of 1890, and how they shaped the rest of her life.

Mrs. Dalloway is about regrets and coping with the consequences of one's decisions. Clarissa has not led a bad life -- in fact, it has been quite comfortable -- but she is cognizant that she gave up love and passion for security. The point of the film isn't to debate whether she made the right or wrong decision, but to emphasize that everyone has roads not taken. For Clarissa, the alternative to her pampered life of parties and domestic tranquillity would have been an existence of travel and adventure, two things that frightened her. The greatest strength of Mrs. Dalloway is that it manages to effectively capture the poignancy and wistful yearning of gazing back through the years at what was and what might have been. Clarissa's bittersweet reminiscences are so powerfully-presented that they will strike a responsive with many viewers. I left the film contemplating the undeniable truth of how quickly (and sometimes cruelly) time passes everyone by.

Juxtaposed with Mrs. Dalloway's story is that of a young, shell-shocked soldier, Septimus Warren- Smith (Rupert Graves), who has never recovered from his experiences in World War I. This material, although thematically relevant to the main plot, causes unwanted interruptions in the narrative that threaten to derail the picture. Graves plays the part effectively, and the story of the young man's loss of identity is tragic, but I found the Warren-Smith scenes to be more of a distraction than a crucial subplot.

Not surprisingly, the acting is top-notch. Redgrave shines, whether she's gazing back through the mists of the past or, in the film's best sequence, making pithy asides to expose the true nature of the guests at her party. Michael Kitchen and John Standing are solid as the two men who were once rivals for Clarissa's affections, and who have changed very little over time. In flashbacks, Natascha McElhone (Surviving Picasso) brings a sparkle to the young Clarissa, and Alan Cox cuts a dashing figure as Peter. The 1890 scenes also feature Lena Headley as Clarissa's best friend, and there are hints of a subtle lesbian attraction.

Mrs. Dalloway will probably appeal most strongly to those who appreciate Merchant- Ivory's unhurried pace. The story, which is more of a character study than a plot-oriented narrative, moves slowly and deliberately, giving us a crystal-clear picture of the many faces of Clarissa Dalloway -- who she was, who she might have been, and who she has become.

Like a beaming swan, Vanessa Redgrave's Clarissa Dalloway glides forth, in the words of her creator, Virginia Woolf, in a "blue-green emotional" haze, blossoming to offer the world her sole talent and great aspiration: the perfect party at which everybody will be sublimely happy, if only for a moment. Burbling "What a lark! What a plunge!" she faces the prospect with such spacey, gushing enthusiasm, you'd think she'd had a sniff of something to get her going, but by the end of the day sober reflections on the life she has led and the choices made in her youth that have brought her to this moment will temper Mrs. Dalloway's ebullience.

It doesn't sound like much, but Woolf's entrancing, always challenging stream-of-consciousness works create miniature universes loaded with profound revelations within the most ordinary incidents (a trip to a lighthouse, Clarissa's party, wishing for a one's own room). Despite her dizzyingly poetic style, Woolf's work never appears tangible enough to form something as practical as a motion picture around, yet British writer Eileen Atkins and Dutch director Marleen Gorris (Antonia's Line) have done the seemingly impossible in creating an elegant, serene Mrs. Dalloway.

No one seems better suited to the daunting task of adapting Woolf's work than Atkins. In 1989 Atkins--co-creator of the brilliant TV series Upstairs, Downstairs--played Woolf in a one-woman show, A Room of One's Own, then wrote and starred in the play Vita and Virginia, playing Woolf to Redgrave's Vita Sackville-West. It was at Redgrave's urging that Atkins turned to an adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway, one of Woolf's more accessible works.

Set within one day in 1923, the film is structured as a series of flashbacks to Clarissa Dalloway's carefree youth, paralleled by a seemingly unrelated side story of the torment of a young, shell-shocked World War I veteran (Rupert Graves). The young Clarissa (Natascha McElhone) finds herself forced to choose between the petulant, foolishly romantic Peter Walsh (Alan Cox) and the wealthy, upright, and uptight Richard Dalloway (John Standing), when she's perfectly content with the warm, playful intimacies of her best friend Sally (Lena Headey). In the very disconnectedness of the two storylines, Woolf pinpoints the great divide between British classes.

The flashback transitions are initially a bit rough, but, in typical Woolfian fashion, Gorris allows no spoon-fed clarifications, in contrast to the Hollywood standard of over-explanation. The disturbingly fascinating tragedy of the distraught veteran, Septimus, practically merits its own film, yet meshes quite well as motivation for the crucial epiphany Mrs. Dalloway experiences in the middle of her (subtly hilarious) party.

Redgrave floats through the film in her usual stately fashion, swathed in wispy pastel gowns, becoming vibrantly alive during the party. By the film's quiet close, Clarissa Dalloway's wish to create an instant of pure happiness seems like the finest--and most impossible--wish upon which to rest a lifetime.

View trailer ---- http://video.barnesandnoble.com/search/mediaplayer.asp?ean=687797753090&z=y

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