OPEN LETTER TO THE WRITERS

Dear Pascal Amanfo & Chinedu Ayanwu,

Collaborating on Faithful Betrayal must have been rewarding. It’s enormous fun when writers are of the same mind. One writer conceives the idea and tells a friend. Bang! Lights go on in the head of the other and both of them toil for weeks or months on end breathing life into the characters and lives they create. Eventually they give birth to larger-than-life onscreen personalities like Genevieve Nnaji, Muna Obiekwe, Alex Usifo Omiagbo and Kofi Adjorlolo as evident in Faithful Betrayal. It is a wonderful union.

Faithful Betrayal starts out as a story of a young girl (Clara) who falls in love with a widower her father’s age. Her parents are quick to accept this mysterious suitor and the relationship is consummated with a low profile marriage ceremony. Barely a week after the wedding, Clara’s husband is almost paralyzed after a fall in the bathtub. Eventually, Clara takes a boyfriend and he’s employed to assist her father in the family business. When the husband relapses into a comma, he is found suffocated and nearly strangled to death.

Collaboration is as delicate as an Ibgo mother conceiving a girl child for a father in need of a son. All artists, especially writers are egotistic, and most collaboration projects haven’t survived because of the egos of partners, though Faithful Betrayal did.

One thing I discovered about Faithful Betrayal is its unsteady theme. In the prelude of the film, a detective is on the phone with her boss reporting an imminent plane crash. I sat up in my sofa looking forward to a fantastic Bruce Willis Die Hard type of thriller. Nope!

The story opens with Clara bringing a suitor home to her parents for the first time. The tension and comic nature of these scenes prepared me for a lesser thrill, but again I looked forward to an African version of Guess Who is Coming to Dinner. Nope again!

About an hour or more into the story, Clara brings home a boyfriend to run the family business. And a desperate boyfriend who would murder just to get ahead in life. When the husband is found nearly strangled to death in his bed, all fingers point to this crazy boyfriend. Nope!

The detective in the prelude who appears during the openning credits and disappears thereafter, shows up again as an investigator of this crime. But the manner of her investigation, the tone, the accent and insolence of Detective Fletcher in Agatha Christe, got me believe that all along I have been watching a crime fiction.

Character development is essential to screenwriting. If a character has murderous traits, the screenwriter must feed viewers snippets of that side of the character as the story progresses. But to turn the story without setting the appropriate character traits makes it unbelievable.

And I’m still undecided: Is this a romance or a Who-Done-It? Please tell me.

Ali Baylay/Publisher .

A movie shot on a budget of $15,000 or less cannot show many of the elements that it takes to make a film a commercial success. It could be graded more on essence; but filmmakers don’t usually achieve their purpose when such elements are either absent or compromised in films.

Desmond Elliot pulls a fine performance here as Eva in this cultic flick. His limping and confident smooth talking makes him all the more believable. He costars with Emeka Ike who portrays Maurice, a Saul Bellow like character of want-want-want! Not too good a performance, though.

In the film, a rich girl’s father is out to get Maurice. His mother is detained as a pawn. Thus, Maurice becomes homeless, banned by the thugs from his own home. He ends up driving a raggedy VW Beetle as a taxi only to be burnt again by the rich man’s thugs. Upon escaping from the scene, he runs into an evangelical pastor (I guess they’re everywhere in Nigeria) by the wayside, who hires Maurice to kill his bible-quoting mother because she stands between him and his desires. Maurice is initiated in the Great Ambassadors, a  satanic cult, by his best friend Eva. I guess joining the Great Ambassadors gives Maurice’s character an identity.

Storytelling, unlike fine arts, must not puzzle the viewer. Films are not poems though they may be poetic. The story must be clear even if the theme is open for interpretation. Also, inaudible and verbose dialogue irritates viewers and creates confusion. Warriors of Satan becomes maddeningly confusing from the point Maurice joins the Great Ambassadors. I keep asking myself who is the star of this film? Eva (Desmond Elliot) and Maurice (Emeka Ike) combat for the lead role. Eva has more scenes than Maurice and is the only actor we see in the last scene of Part 2. However, the cover of this dark flick proclaims: “They wanted him at all cost but the mother was the only obstacle, so the only way was to kill her. Did Maurice succeed with the cult?” I have to wonder if Maurice even deserved the top billing in the movie!

Warriors of Satan 3 may have the answer but don’t be surprised if it morphs into “THE GREAT AMBASSADORS.”

Ali Baylay, Publisher/USA

I have never had the time to sit through Nollywood movies. Reason is, either most of the themes are watered-down or exploitative, or the movie is just too long for this viewer. I managed to sit through Pastor’s Blood 1 & 2 and these gruesome films just didn’t deliver.

Pastor’s Blood is the story of Akirika, a village voodoo tyrant out to settle a land dispute. In the process to own the property, Akirika uses voodoo to kill his opponent. In the Igbo land, murder by any means is an abomination, and once proven guilty, the accused must be hanged. So to cover his act, Akirika goes on a witness killing spree.

For the story’s subplot, screenwriter Michael Oji invented a young evangelical preacher who comes back to his village to spread the gospel, digs out Akirika’s voodoo, and puts an end to the killings. Like Christ who died unjustly, the preacher, in a bizarre twist of fortune, gets embroiled in a case of rape and is then hanged by the council of elders. Abruptly, the story ends.

Don’t get me wrong if I missed Pastor’s Blood 3 where Akirika may have got his equal reward for evil, but to end the story in such an abrupt manner with no resolution that bridges the two plots, or even an AFTERWARD statement informing viewers what befalls Akirika, is like the filmmakers are glorifying juju justice.

Ali Baylay, USA