Dan David Film presents, Dan David (Dave), Nora Clifford (Noma), Anna Dekonsaye (Kira), Livinus Nnochiri (Chief Roy), Dave Ogbeni (Sky), Ibiwari Etuk (Helena), Oleg Suturun (Dima), Kevin Mike (Wilson), Esther Audu (Claire). Cinematographer, Kenneth Nwabueze/Froyane Maksim (Russia); Editor, Jesse Chris; Producer and Executive Producer, Dan David; Directors, Kenneth Nwabueze/Froyane Maksim (Russia); Screenwriter, Dan David. C2017
November 12 is this strange story with which you can kill a lonely Sunday evening. Well, you could do so with a bottle or two of Budweiser, while you watch, just so you can’t connect the thread of the story, but revel in the clean cut rapid frames on the screen. It has the ingredient of a well-written story and a serious cinematography and direction put together. It’s however, a story of a love train that started out of Moscow and snakes its way into a well-furnished mansion in Lagos and wrecked right there. The only passenger on this train with a one-way ticket, is Dave, a well built pure mandingo-like stature from the Lower Sudan.
Dave (Dan David) is telling his Russian girl that his father wants him home and he’s not sure he’ll be back. He leaves his girl heart broken and boards Air Emirate to Nigeria. In Nigeria, his father has a bride, Claire (Esther Audu) waiting for him. Dave didn’t immediately take to Claire. Matter of fact, Dave suffers from indecision as to who he was in love it, the Russian he left in Moscow, or Claire his father has been nurturing for him. Instead and on a whim, he then falls in love with a brunette, called, Noma (Nora Clifford), and had a one night stand with her, and she messed with his head. Before long, Dave and Noma decide to wed on November 12, Dave’s birthday.
Dave’s father, Chief Roy (Livinus Nnochiri), had not favored Dave’s relationship with his Russian girlfriend because he didn’t want him to go through the same experience he went through with Dave’s white Parisian mother. That’s the reason Chief called Dave home, to stay away from the Russian. His father wants him to marry Claire on his birthday, November 12.
Chief Roy leaves town but with the pretense of giving a chance to Dave to get used to Claire or, for both Claire and Dave getting used to each other. Then, Dave is announced mysteriously sick in the hospital with a kidney failure. While in the hospital, his best friend, Sky (Dave Ogbeni), with the pretense of pampering Noma, makes love to her without much resistance. Dave’s cousin too tries his luck with Claire and succeeded. It’s like both his friend and cousin inherits his spoils, now that he’s incapable and bed-ridden in the hospital. The Russian girl too is pregnant for Dave’s Russian friend.
This November 12 reminds me of the 2005 movie, November made in the United States. November has one particular similarity with November 12. Both are mystery movies. November is about a mysterious incident that occurred to a family traveling on a highway and stopped at an out of the way convenient store to buy his wife a snack, but entered upon a robbery and the husband is shot dead. That’s not the mystery. It is when, the woman, a teacher of photography stumbled upon a student’s class project photo, which captured the incident at the convenient store, the night her husband was killed. Who was the photographer? How did the student get the picture of the incident, in which her car, and her sitting in it, were featured in the shot?
I try to unravel the mystery in this movie. And after a week long cudgeling of my old and tired brain, I looked passed the film, and lo behold, it struck me that November 12 has its genesis in Crime Of The Heart, and Deep. Two mystery genres with the face and handiwork of both Nora Clifford (Casting Director/Producer-Crime Of The Heart; Casting and Associate Producer/Actor-Deep); and Dave Ogbeni (Director/Casting-Crime Ot The Heart; Casting, Producer, and Actor-Deep) pasted to the credits of November 12. Film review class teaches us, to understand the work of an artist, one has to go back in history and look at previous works. Voila! Here we are in November 12.
Crime Of The Heart mystery is about Thelma and Brenda, members of the female occult who gave up their souls and wombs to the devil, to be wealthy but in return, never to have kids. This secret couldn’t come to light until when Brenda’s only brother brought home a wife-to-be, who happens to have taken the oath of blood and demon at the altar with Thelma. Thelma wouldn’t let her only brother married a woman of such deep secret, one, with all the money in the world but couldn’t bear a child.
In Deep too, Nora Clifford plays one of the five women who gather at Spencer’s mansion, to sympathize with him for the death of his wife who mysteriously died. Here too in the movie, one of the mourners is found half drowned in a tub, stabbed to death. We shall know later about the killer according to the Afterward. November 12 has similar mysterious incidents, and the story refuses to answer all the questions a critical eye could wait for in a drama of this nature.
Whereas Crime Of The Heart is a high school literature theses in Shakespeare with too much verbosity, Deep is a literal Polly. It talks and talks and discussions with no movement. No action but keeps us in a plush Nollywood mansion of the widower, Spencer’s living room among all these beautiful women, who weigh heavier than their contribution to the movement of the story. Deep has no drama, but recitation, reading, and recitation and in the end, we must look into the future production that will hand over to us the culprit of Kamara’s murderer. Kamara and Zema and maybe some other woman in the story likely had lesbian affairs. Then too, another lady had a crush on Spencer, so it could be she murdered Kamara to get her out of the way. I do not mean the woman, Bianca, somebody or herself stabbed her in the neck in the tub. She doesn’t matter. She’s an aside with no plot leaning. Yet!
Nora Clifford and Dave Ogbene run the show in November 12, so it is no mystery or coincident, I can’t get through the story. It is intended for us, Nora Clifford, meant that is, not for us to understand the mystery surrounding November 12. It’s all good. What isn’t good is:
November 12 has no November 12 either. We, of course, learn that Dan David and Esther Audu, at last, married but it is in the Afterwards. If we had named the movie November 12 and risked our plot and theme, and title on November 12, we had created an expectant feeling in the viewers. Story wise we need to see the grand finale of that November 12. But telling us in an Afterward, as the story did, undercut the importance of the title, theme, and plot altogether. At curtain down, I am still asking, where is November 12 ? With my beer bottle high up in hand, I stood up yelling in my living room: Where is November 12, people?!
Oh, one more thing, the Cinematographer of the movies listed above is no other than Kenneth Nwabueze. It’s like a family business. The actors, producers and directors and Cinematographer, live under the same roof and sleep in the same bed, metaphorically. And with the same production mind and philosophy. Will this same team be producing romance, crime or occult themes, or they need to break away from mystery drama altogether? Movies created for the theatre shouldn’t take the audience to task. I didn’t pay my hard-earned Naira to answer the puzzle. I should’ve stayed home and cudgel my poor brain as to whatever my government did with the Ebola funds.