Before watching

1- In the Postmodernist novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham there are three main female characters: Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughn, named "Mrs Dalloway".
The narration regarding Mrs Woolf is set in 1923 in a suburb of London. Mrs Brown's story is set in Los Angeles, in 1949, while Mrs Dalloway's one is set in New York City, in the end of the 20ieth century.
Analysing the extracts taken from the first three chapters of The Hours, the reader can find some similarities with the beginning of Virginia Woolf's Modernist novel Mrs Dalloway.
At the very beginning of the chapter "Mrs Dalloway" in The Hours, Clarissa is going out from her house to buy the flowers, as Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway does. In both extracts it is a nice morning of June and both the characters stop out of their houses, assailed by many feelings. Another similarity is the kind of feeling: they compare fresh air to fresh water (Clarissa Vaughan stops as if she is standing near a swimming pool and Mrs Dalloway compares the the morning freshness to a wave). Both the characters notice everything around them (sounds, people) and both think it is wonderful to live in that moment of June (the sentences used are similar: Michael Cunningham writes "What a thrill, what a shock" and Virginia Woolf writes "What a lark! What a plunge!").
So both women are presented through their name, the period and the place where they live, their feelings in a particular morning, their actions, their thoughts. Also the cities where the women live are presented: New York and London, both characterized by movement.
Comparing the beginning of Mrs Dalloway novel  to the opening of the chapter about Mrs Brown in The Hours, both the women feel themself shocked in that morning, as if they have lost themselves. Like Mrs Dalloway, Laura Brown is characterized by her name, where and when she live, her feelings (she wants to enter in a parallel world), her thoughts (about the bedroom and her things).

2- After the scenes about Virginia Woolf's suicide (which is the prologue in the novel), the film moves to Los Angeles in 1949. A man is coming back to his house with flowers. After he comes into the house, he goes to his bedroom and the attention shifts to a female charcter, Mrs Brown, who is still sleeping.
Then the director moves the scene to Richmond in 1923. A man is walking in a street and he is coming to his home. When he arrives he asks the doctor about Mrs Woolf's health. The attention moves upstairs, in a bedroom, where Mrs Woolf is in her bed wide- awaken.
Immediately the scene changes: it is New York in 2001. A woman is walking in a street and also she is coming to home. She enters her bedroom and goes to bed, and the attention shfits to the other woman asleep in the bed, Mrs Dalloway (Clarissa Vaughn).
From the very beginning of the film the director shows the connections between the three main female characters: Mrs Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Brown. All their actions are similar: they hear the sound of alarm clock (or the clock strikes), the actions in the morning and the shifting of a pot of flowers in the three different time dimensions.
In Michael Cunningham's novel, the women are immediately introduced through their thoughts and their actions in that morning, without using now other characters' point of view.
The reader focuses his attention immediately on Mrs Dalloway who is leaving her house in order to buy the flowers and he can know her feelings and her thoughts.
Mrs Woolf is still in the bed and she is thinking about the beginning of her novel. The reader can know what she thinks and also what she dreams when she falls asleep again.
Mrs Brown is reading Mrs Dalloway. The reader can know what she feels while she is reading and what she thinks looking at her bedroom.