Director Marleen Gorris, who made the Oscar-winning Dutch film Antonia's Line, uses voice-overs to reflect Clarissa's quickly changing moods, sudden fears, and unspoken joys. This conventional solution to the problem of filming the novel becomes an artistic instrument in the hands of Redgrave, whose elegance and transparent emotions communicate her character's wistful disappointment just as Woolf would have wished. Clarissa's flights of memory are handled through flashback scenes, in which Natascha McElhone portrays the heroine with the eager enthusiasm of youth. She plays tennis, goes boating, has deep conversations about the abolition of private property with her friend Sally, and obviously cannot foresee an end to her attractive naivet.

Intercut with Clarissa's story is a day in the life of a shell-shocked young man who has returned from the Italian front only to relive the death of his comrade over and over. Although on its surface easier to dramatize than the main story line, this secondary plot clearly doesn't capture Gorris' imagination; it lacks the feminist themes she finds so attractive in the first. Until the two intersect, as Clarissa stands on her balcony between heaven and earth, the second story fails to achieve much resonance.

Yet, unlike her work in the tiringly doctrinaire Antonia's Line, Gorris' direction of Mrs. Dalloway has a depth and subtlety befitting the material. The tale of female potential as yet unrealized, of opportunities lost and intimacy betrayed, is a far worthier subject for a feminist filmmaker than the simple triumph of the X chromosome over the Y. In the moment of the edit between McElhone's outgoing beauty and Redgrave's luminous interiority, all that needs to be known about Clarissa's lost possibilities hangs in the air.