Nwabugwu Okoroafor/ Silas Obasi production presents Genevieve Nnaji (Vannessa), Sam Dede (Ken), Enebeli Elebuwa (Chief Osaze), Charles Okocha (Jeff), Georgina Onuoha (Evelyn), Ify Arinze (Jessica), Emma Odili (Lex). Story/Executive Producer, Silas Obasi; Screenplay, Emem Isong; Director of Photography, Emmanuel Olabode; Editor, Akande Musbau; Producer, Cajetan Ugwuegbu; Director, Obi Callys Obinali (dgn). (2017)
Keeping My Man is a dependent clause, like a half-baked rhythm and blues, note that strikes a memory cord in your heart. The title itself is not discordant, but if it were a rhythm and blues love song, not from Mary J. Blige of course, (she complains and whines a lot), from Whitney Houston, this one ends in a staccato. Vennessa (Genevieve Nnaji) and her brother Jeff (Charles Okocha), are the two children of an influential senator, Chief Osaze (Enebeli Elebuwa) who get romantically involved with the ordinary folks of their society. Whereas we expect such relationships to bloom, and end up in a double marriage with Ken (Sam Dede), and Vennessa, and Evelyn (Georgina Onuoha), and Jeff it, however, ends in tragedy. Jeff dead and Vennessa in handcuffs marched off to prison.
One more review of films that feature Genevieve Nnaje as the protagonist, I would start writing a theory on her acting career. I’ve seen her as this vicious woman in Cornered as a bad girl when she wants to kill Ramsey Noah (Cyprian Idriss/Cross) for his money, and she gets poisoned in the end instead. She again plays the over-zealous and ambitious woman out to take the Abuja community and its manhood by its balls in A Trip To Abuja but ends in handcuffs. Here too, in Keeping My Man, the poor girl ends up in handcuffs. Oh yeah, she can be sweet as an angel or a ladybird, as we see her in Beautiful Soul when she’s struck with terminal disease, and knowing she’s about to die, gives away all her inheritance to the poor and disadvantaged in her community. In the two films mentioned above and now this, she can be as bitter as Atwood’s Bitters. You remember the dark potion our parents gave us, for jaundice, headache, worms, loss of appetite, colds, and fever, when we were young? The one you squiggled your throat when you took a spoonful? Bitter like hell. And that’s Nnanje when she’s not in her form. In this film, she’s not in shape. Here, she’s tenacious, spoilt, vengeful and dangerous, like Glen Close in Fatal Attraction (1987). A real rattlesnake, Genevieve can be.
One will note that the characters and behaviors of both Jeff and Vennessa are not meant to last well into the end of the story, for they are unmanageable, high-handed and rude. Before Vennessa arrives in town from the States, her younger brother Jeff dates a beau called Evelyn. If Evelyn and Genevieve Nnaji were to stand in a beauty contest, the price definitely would go to Evelyn. Because of her social status, Jeff didn’t respect Evelyn-he, the son of an influential senator, and she, the daughter of a commoner. He abuses and shames her continually, yet she still clings to him even as her friends warned and advised her to leave Jeff alone. Vennessa too, a law graduate, arrives in town at her parents’ house but introduces herself as a rude, unmanageable daughter when she abruptly leaves the respectable company of ministers, managers, business tycoons her father had invited to her welcome party and clattered her way back upstairs to her room. Vennesa falls profoundly and crazily in love with Ken, a Nollywood celebrity, who didn’t care an f*** that Vanessa is a practicing lawyer and a daughter of a senator. Since Vannessa couldn’t cook and carries so much of a chip on her shoulder, Ken concludes she can’t be loved and be domesticated.
The beauty of the story is where the two plotlines, Jeff and Evelyn, and Vannessa and Ken, meet inevitably and expectantly. Jeff and Evelyn have a relationship that bothers on a threat, molestation and disrespect by the senator’s son, but Evelyn has no way out at her discretion. Ken is fed up with Vennessa because she is rude, and feels she can dictate the relationship at her will. In a chance meeting in a restaurant, where Ken witnesses another barrage of abuse and temper by Jeff, as he storms out of the restaurant, leaving Evelyn with the bill, Ken comes to her rescue. A relationship between Ken and Evelyn starts from there and results in love and romance, which he could never have gotten from Vennessa. Jeff and Vennessa make series of attempts on Evelyn’s life, and in the final effort, Jeff is shot dead by one of his hired hands. The police arrest Vennessa for her attempt to murder Vennessa.
I would have loved this movie turned into something like Taming Of The Shrewed. I would have loved Ken to tame Vennessa. The screenwriter doesn’t think what you and I think, and instead, he branched off into the world of Fatal Attraction, where Michael Douglas, meets Glen Close, kiss her and have a one night stand, and all hell breaks loose, and she won’t let him go. It always happens to men who kiss girls and leave them crying for more. You bet it’s in the kiss. Vanessa falls in love with Ken in absentia, and when she happens to cross path with him in a furniture store, it is deja vu. She’s about to crow for Ken. Vennessa doesn’t even speak straight. She’s overwhelmingly in love with him, but alas, poor girl, she can’t help herself with her rude manners. Remember, in life, ‘manners maketh the man,’ the Greek proverb goes.
This movie has a tightly unified plot where the writer and producer were careful not to mess with any of the opposing plotlines without defeating the purpose of complication and confrontation. Jeff’s character as a high-handed woman abuser, and as a disrespectful son of his parents is a sure sign that his role by the end of the story is doomed. Vennessa introduces herself on her arrival welcome party as a rude and insolent woman, who will not conform to the norms of the society she has come to call home. On the other side of the aisle, is Ken and Evelyn, both composed and comfortable in their dispositions and looking for love not based on any criteria but natural love and respect for one another. One can sense imminent confrontation when there’s this love-swap. There’s nothing coincidental about the story. There are cause and effect theory and subsequent incidents that build up to a disappointing but beautiful resolution.
Emem Isong is a writer and producer to boot. Some years back I reviewed his Guilty Pleasures (2009), where he features Yul Edochie as the creepy handyman who has a way with wealthy Lagos sex-starved women and kills their husbands afterward. Then last year, I stumbled on another of his films: Bursting Out (2010). Bursting Out has the most memorable Nollywood movie monologue I carry with me to date. In a moment of truth scene, Majid, says to Genevieve Nnaji (Zara). “I’ve never been so humiliated in my life…I’m tired Zara, I’m tired of fighting, I’m tired of trying to live up to everyone’s expectations, I’m a disappointment to everyone including myself…I have a career going down the drain, and here I am running errands for people, and I’m in love with a girl I can’t even have.” That monologue is universal. It could be you, or whosoever had achieved success but fell off the bridge of fortune, and the world looks down on him. My eyes always welled up tears every time I watched that scene, and something magical keeps drawing me to it. Now that’s a dramatic fit of a writing ingenuity. Emem Isong pulled a big one on me in that monologue, and that is where I came to respect him as a Nollywood dramatist of repute. Keeping My Man doesn’t measure up to Bursting Out, but its storyline is a classic as well. Watch it.