The lives, loves, petty snobberies and private torments of some of Nigeria's most privileged people would not seem the stuff to solicit much sympathy in a megacity where the rich float over so much human misery.But critics at Cannes have found the brothers' sly post-colonial take on Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs Dalloway" one of the most subtle and affecting movies of the year so far. "How lucky we are" they took it on, wrote the Hollywood Reporter's Lovia Gyarkye, while The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw called the movie "seductive" and "mesmeric". Veteran RogerEbert.com critic Brian Tallerico declared it "one of the better films I'll see this year".Waking up as the major discoveries of the festival so far has not phased the twins one bit, they told AFP the morning after its 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.
British actress Sophie Okonedo, who plays the high-society hostess in 'Clarissa' and her star-crossed lover in the film, 'Selma' star David Oyelowo © Thibaud MORITZ / AFP
Nor have the inevitable comparisons with other film-making siblings like the Coen brothers, the Dardennes and the Wachowski sisters, who made "The Matrix".Arie, the older of the two, said shooting with his twin 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 Nigerias"Clarissa", told in restrained flashback, is as much about post-independence Nigeria as it is about its upper crust, which the brothers say they know only too well, having "been born into it".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, Chuko said. And most of the wealthy in the film have adopted the manners and clipped accents of their old colonial masters, the British.The twins' tale turns on the intertwining stories 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 his faith in humanity shattered by the corruption of his superiors.
