"Mrs. Dalloway" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL April 11, 1998 At long last, a film I saw up North several weeks ago on Spring Break and that I've been waiting to tell you about has finally made it to our vicinity. Not to Tampa or St. Pete, but for those willing to go a bit farther afield, to Sarasota. The film is "Mrs. Dalloway," and it is a must see for feminist film lovers. And why not; its feminist bloodlines are impeccable. First of all, it is a film adaptation of one of Virginia Woolf's finest novels also titled "Mrs. Dalloway." Its screenplay is the work of Eileen Atkins, a British actor who has been involved in interpreting the life and work of Virginia Woolf for several years now, including her adaptation of Woolf's 1928 lecture "A Room of One's Own" to a one woman show that she performed on stage and later on Masterpiece Theater. She also played Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Redgrave's Vita Sackville-West in the play "Virginia and Vita" that played off Broadway a few years ago and that I had the good fortune of seeing. I believe this is Atkins' first screenplay. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness manner of writing has long seemed to be impossible to bring to the screen, but I must say Atkins has done a wonderful adaptation that works perfectly well on screen and any but the dullest of moviegoers will quickly catch on to and be able to follow in and out of "reality" vs. "consciousness." Of course, as consummate an actor as Vanessa Redgrave, who plays Mrs. Dalloway, can make nearly any screenplay come to life, and here, working with her friend and colleague Atkins on subject matter that she, too, has a special affinity for, she give a splendid performance in the title role. Another reason the screenplay works so well and that the intercutting of reality, memory and thought is not jarring is the talent and commitment of the director, the great Dutch feminist filmmaker, Marleen Gorris, who in the last twenty years has brought us at least three of the best feminist feature films going: "A Question of Silence" in the early 80s, "Antonia's Line" in the mid 90s, and now this lovely film. Take scene at the beginning of the film when Clarissa Dalloway bursts from her London home into a bright Spring morning on her way to buy flowers for the party she's giving that night. Immediately we get a jump cut to a vibrant young woman whom we are soon to recognize as young Clarissa herself (Natascha McElhone), bursting out of the French doors of a stately home in the country into a bright Spring morning. The jump cut tells us there is a connection between the two. And the connection is in Clarissa's memory; today's exhilarating moment brings forth the long buried memory of that similar moment of exuberance thirtysome years before that's had been lodged in her unconscious all those years. Anyway the combined talents of Woolf, Atkins, Redgrave, and Gorris are staggering and the result is a film I really loved. If you've read the novel you know that on one level it's about a single day, albeit an important one, in the life of an upper class London matron who has lived a fairly conventional upper class life during the early decades of the 20th Century. As already indicated, it is, however much more than that. Its about mental and emotional connections that underlie the events of the day, and, since her girlhood love Sally Seton and her one-time fiance will be seeing her for the first time in many years, Clarissa reflects and ruminates on her life--what it is, what it might habe been had she made other choices, had she been able to make different choices. Why did she and Sally, whose love for each other was so much stronger than that they felt for the young men in their lives, never question their heterosexual identity or the assumption that, of course, they would marry one of these young men? Why didn't she marry passionate Peter and travel the world to exotic places? The audience is allowed to reflect and ruminate on these and other questions and the reasons--societal, attitudinal, conceptual, and personal--why she was prevented from making such choices. On yet another level it's a film, as it was a book, about the great tragedy of Woolf's generation, World War I, and the untold suffering and loss the war caused both during its four year duration and in its aftermath. She does this by juxtaposing the character of Clarissa Dalloway with the character of a young war veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, played just superbly by Rupert Graves, who is suffering from what they then called "shell shock." He is in a psychotic state, having horrible flashbacks of a moment in which one of his comrades was blown up by a shell just feet away from him. As he and his wife travel through London on that Spring morning, his path crosses that of Clarissa Dalloway on two occasions, though they never actually meet or speak, and it is the news of his death by suicide that she hears from Septimus's psychiatrist at her party (though she doesn't know of whom he is speaking) that propels her into what seems to be her most moroseful meditation on her life and the opportunities she has missed, possibly to the point of momentarily considering suicide as well. But this moment passes as she returns to her role as the smiling and perfect upper-class society wife to a distinguised and kindly if somewhat boring barrister and a woman who has given a party that's such a success even the Prime Minister came. "Mrs. Dalloway" is now playing at the Burns Court Cinema in Sarasota. Let's hope it comes soon to Tampa/St. Pete. Copyright 1998 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint or reproduce this review without the permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.| ....