By Ali Baylay 

Starring: Van Vicker, Chika Ike,Queen Nwaokoye; Screenplay: Tchidi Chikere; Make up: Kingsley Godwin; Costume: Chinela Nwagboso; Editor: Nelson Joe; Director: Tchudi Chikere; Producer: Paul Ejike Afube; 124 mins C 2010.                                                              

 Austin (Van Vicker) gets home from war torn Liberia amidst joy as he’s welcomed home by both his wife Laura (Chika Ike) and little son. He’s been gone two years now. His son has grown and Laura’s libido gone amok. In the bed room the first night after two years, Laura’s disappointed when Austin doesn’t want to have sex with him: 

                                                                            LAURA

                                                                           (In shock)

                                     It can’t be this bad…Can it? I’m your wife!

                                                                           AUSTIN

                                                                 (Begging but firm)

                                     Not now.

                                                                            LAURA

                                     C’mon baby, you can’t do this now. I’ve been

                                  Celibate for two years… 

With fear in his eyes, Austin turns from Laura’s gaze as she sits defeated and embarrassed. He stands up and exits the bed room. 

Austin has been falsely diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and tries not to transfer the disease to his loving wife but at the same time fears to tell her he has the disease. He goes out to a private clinic to find help in secret and meets nurse Grace (Queen Nwaokoye) who proves to be his salvation. In the hands of Grace, he’s found HIV negative and he moves in back with his wife and everything is dandy until six months after, Grace discloses to Austin that she’s carrying his baby. 

From this point on, Grace threatens Austin as he hides from Laura his outside affairs. In the end Laura has to know and Austin gets put out. Grace did not get the money Austin promises to keep things under cover. Austin cannot take the situation he finds himself in so he drowns himself. 

A film like every work of art especially literature has an outer and inner world, a text and subtext or narrative. And because what lies beneath can be much more intriguing than the surface, I’m going to approach Battleman solely from the subtext. In his opening dialogue in the bed room with his wife, Austin repeatedly tells his wife his frame of mine at the battle field in Liberia, “I’m gonna live, I’m gonna live, I’m gonna live!” Austin did survive through the rigors of war, fight like Hercules in the Trojan War, only to come home to drown himself because of marital problems. The symbolic effect of this incident in the story is underlining the fact that no one comes out of war unscathed. 

Melodrama throws joy, pain and dissatisfaction in our faces, and insists in scenes after scenes that things will get better, then jabs at our conscience and in the end, takes that feeling back from us, still telling us that we’ll be fine if we only modify our expectations, like for instance death to our beloved character. We see how the writer plays with our emotions here in Battleman. We’re happy for Austin to get home from a raging war he survives in Liberia. Yet at home where we expect joy and peace, we’re witnessing a new form of battle field: fight to keep disease from his wife, and an affair and a child with a nurse. 

Melodrama must create a world of threat not only to its characters but to the audience before it resolves itself. It has to carry emotional graph to an unbearable height, as we witness in the scene where the one time nurse Grace, and Austin’s salvation becomes his blackmailer, wagering a price over the secret of carrying his baby. 

In melodrama, characters are properly steadily managed and if they cannot be managed because they’ve gone too deep into the course of things, then they deserve an absence or be killed. Austin, by virtue of being so entwined in problems with his wife and a struggle to keep an outside affair a secret, finds that there’s no way out of the quagmire but to take his own life. This is purely like a Greek Tragedy

However, the word ‘battleman’ connote a survivor who can fight all odds and always come on top, as commonly used in this English speaking enclave of West Africa. It is a little wonder and a shame, to see a battleman drown himself in a murky river.

By Ali Baylay

A DEVINE TOUCH PRODUCTION. Starring: John Dumelo, Tonto Dikeh, Jibola Dabo, Ashley Nwosu; Production Manager: Emeka Ojiafor; Story/Screenplay: Chisom Juliet Okereke; Editor: Okiki David; Continuity:  Winning Team; Executive Producers: Kingsley Okereke, Emeka Igwemba; Director: Theodore Anyanji. 130 mins. c2009

Even though My Fantasy is a movie based on phantasma, you’ll ask yourself where on earth such power in one person exists as in Sir Rufus, when he could imprison another citizen at will.  I guess this will only happen in Nollywood or Gollywood where conventional statutory law does not apply. But it’s all good to see strange bed fellows like Gollywood and Nollywood, team together on a project such as My Fantasy. Nollywwod has a trait of getting the job done in a record time before the sun sets, and Gollywood with a Knack for quality, to a large extent in shots

In a curious way, My Fantasy reminds me of Indecent Proposal in which Robert Redford offered Woody Harrison one million dollars for a time with his wife, Demi Moore. Having a tight time and running out of it to redeem his architectural masterpiece (house) from foreclosure, he has to give in. My Fantasy is a movie in which Sir Rufus, makes such an indecent proposal to Joe. Joe works for Sir Rufus’s night club, and happens to get caught on camera crossing a shady deal. He’s called to answer to the accusation in front of Sir Rufus and found guilty of the crime. As a punishment, he’s locked up in a cellar at the club.

When Joe’s daughter would trace her father back to the club, she found herself in the presence of Sir Rufus, who demands her love in return for the money her father stole from him. Being pushed against the wall and have no other option, Joe agrees to give his daughter over to Sir Rufus as a pawn.

In a memorable film moment, Joe hammers his reason home to the daughter by disclosing to her that he’s not her real father. Amidst tears, the daughter has no choice but to succumb to the most gruesome sexual ordeal Nollywood has ever brought to our living rooms.

I have a problem with this film, if I could be honest. In theory of film, the premise of My Fantasy is to present a formidable villain who needs a formidable hero to break his wings. Sir Rufus is presented as a formidable villain, who can lock fellow citizens in his private den without recourse, and in fact no one dares cross the barricade of securities that man his private empire. By virtue of his position as a Goliath, the script needed a stone throwing David. But instead of David, Micheal is trashed into oblivion and never heard or seen again until we see him in a drunken stupor making it out with another woman.

 Even as Joe could make one last ditch effort to get his daughter back from Sir Rufus, he’s warded off like a fly as he lamely borrows from Arnold in the Terminator, and scurries off from the scene, “I’ll be back”. He never gets back, but goes into oblivion too. I guess he’s in the imaginary world of My Fantasy, drowning in both brandy and his guilty conscience.

We wouldn’t have taken Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet seriously hadn’t they decided to die in each other’s arm for the sake of love. In most modern films, evil is always punished. We the audience [OB1] demand retribution and redemption: that those in difficulty shall be freed; those lost shall eventually find the way out, that philandering woman will note that a love of a husband and to raise a family shall bring the union a full life. Here in My Fantasy, there’s no stake, and an educated audience can neither fully sympathize with Rosie, nor Michael, nor Joe, for they show no steadfastness in their characters.

By American standard of rating movies, My Fantasy would have passed more as an x-rated flick than a film an African parent could watch with his children. The phallic desire expressed in the character of Sir Rufus: the roar in bed like a lion, and especially in the last scene where Rosie completely succumbs to his kinky, brutal and sexual desire and both start getting naked, is certainly not meant for the average African family. However, at curtain down, I went in the shower, got lost in my own fantasy and took a long hot bath.