My Story

 

 

My Story

My Story is a hybrid form of Fatal Attraction. Vickey, a married woman, introduces Stanley to her elegant pad like a lion lures a prey to his den. Once in the den she eventually succeeds in seducing him with a kiss (I nominate this kiss as Nollywood’s on-screen kiss of the year) and Stanley’s innocence is deflowered. He has eaten of the apple and like Adam before we are left corrupted. His entire world revolves around this married woman.

Vickey’s shrewd manipulation of Stanley to kill the old hag of her husband makes Stanley an accessory to murder. Having killed her husband and now left with a young and restless boyfriend who can’t get enough of her loving, she becomes disdainful of him and decides to poison Stanley. Seeing the lead man from Beyonce on the floor, spilling blood and painfully dying, makes My Story Part 1 a pure Greek tragedy.

“It lies not in our power to love or to hate for the will in us is overruled by fate,” Christopher Marlowe says in one of his poems. This statement is appropriate for Stanley (Van Vicker, The President’s Daughter, American Boy) as we see him enthralled by the beauty of Vickey like a deer caught in the glare of headlights. The seduction of Stanley by Vickey (Omotola Jalade-Ekehinde) is too overpowering. In the opening scenes in Vickey’s bedroom, Stanley is completely helpless in the face of the formidable beauty of Vickey. In Beyonce, he lusts, but in My Story, he personifies the fate of Adam. Stanley’s falling in love with Vickey and his ultimate death by poison is the work of fate.

“Whoever loved that loved not at first sight,” Marlowe says at length. The phallic desire in people for another person is uncontrollable, mysterious and inexplicable. It violates logic. Why Stanley should fall in love with a married woman is everybody’s wonder and to finish a murder she initiates exceeds my comprehension.

The moral of this well-rounded Part 1 of My Story is that, first, there is no second guessing falling in love, for people always do so at first sight; and second, whatever comes out of a relationship is predestined. Well, the theme of My Story is universal based on the premise-freewill, fate, and predestination. My Story is a human story Nollywood should be telling more on the screen.