Twins Impress Cannes with Mesmerizing Story About Nigeria's Wealth

The Lagos of Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Cannes Film Festival entry “Clarissa” is a vision that has never before appeared on the big screen.

The film explores the lives, loves, petty snobberies and private torments of some of Nigeria’s most privileged, a subject that might not seem to invite much sympathy in a city where the wealthy often appear detached from widespread suffering.

Yet critics at Cannes praised the brothers’ subtle, post‑colonial take on Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs Dalloway” as one of the most affecting movies of the year to date.

“How lucky we are,” wrote Lovia Gyarkye of the Hollywood Reporter, while Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called the film “seductive” and “mesmeric.” Veteran RogerEbert.com critic Brian Tallerico declared it “one of the better films I’ll see this year.”

Despite being hailed as a major discovery of the festival, the twins remained unflappable, telling AFP the morning after the film’s triumphant premiere in the Director’s Fortnight section.

‘Wired differently’

Fortunes “rise and fall like the currency” in Nigeria, joked Chuko, the marginally younger and more talkative of the two 40‑year‑olds.

He also noted that inevitable comparisons with other filmmaking siblings such as the Coen brothers, the Dardennes and the Wachowski sisters, who made “The Matrix,” are unlikely to be fruitful.

Arie, the older twin, said shooting with his brother is a kind of superpower, admitting he usually plays the tough guy on set.

“We’re twins but we’re wired differently. I’m right‑handed,” said Chuko, “and he’s left‑handed. He’s visual, I’m more narrative.”

Two Nigerians

“Clarissa,” told in restrained flashback, is as much about post‑independence Nigeria as it is about its upper crust, a class the brothers say they know all too well, having “been born into it.”

Chuko said Africa’s most populous nation “is like any underdeveloped country — the middle disappears and so it’s basically just two classes,” the poor and the rich, and that most of the wealthy in the film have adopted the manners and clipped accents of their former colonial masters, the British.

The twins’ story centers on the intertwined lives of a high‑society hostess and the soldier husband of her dressmaker, who returns from fighting Boko Haram jihadists in the north with PTSD and a shattered faith in humanity due to the corruption of his superiors.

Part of the tragedy is that the suffering of the two‑decade insurgency “doesn’t touch you in Lagos, in the south at all,” Chuko said. “It’s like being in England and seeing the war in Iraq,” he argued.

That disconnect is symbolised by a wonky mosaic mirroring the shape of the country in the hostess’s chic seaside home that no one can quite set straight.

“It’s a perfect motif of the nation,” the director said. “It’s slightly off and needs correcting.” Like Nigeria, “it could be amazing. It just needs a little adjustment” but no one quite knows how.

“The idea of Nigeria is like an ongoing debate. Do we become two countries? Do we stay as one, because it was two countries pushed into one during the colonial era,” said Chuko.

African wave

Neon, the distributors of the last six winners of Cannes’ top prize, have already secured the film.

The Esiris meanwhile have another film, “Three Souls,” about the break‑up of a band, already in development, and a Nigerian whodunnit to follow.

“Clarissa” is the second African film to receive a rapturous reception at Cannes this year after “Congo Boy” from the Central African Republic, with two other entries from Rwanda and Morocco also competing for prizes.

Like the brothers’ first film, the highly praised “Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)” in 2020, “Clarissa” is punctuated with power cuts, “an everyday occurrence” in Nigeria, Chuko said.

Nigeria followed them to the Cannes premiere, with life imitating art as the projector jammed during the opening credits, forcing organisers to start the film all over again.

An hour and a half later, the critics who had jeered at the embarrassing hitch were on their feet clapping and cheering.

Vanguard News

The post Twins wow Cannes with ‘mesmeric’ tale of Nigeria’s rich appeared first on Vanguard News.