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

Executive Image Movies and Franco Films Presents: Emeka Ike, Nadia Buari, Chika Ike, Fredo Arico, Emeka Ani; Production Manager: Ben Ayosinti; Producer: Kenneth Okonkwo; Editor: Nnoshiri Charles Brain; Exec. Producer: Kenneth Okonkwo; Director: Ugo Ugbor; Principal Locations: Ghana/Nigeria; 133 mins. c2009.

The Followers is a topic that invokes religious connotations as in ‘disciples’, but don’t be fooled brother, this is a film glorifying animism and devil worship with Christian church simply as a front. To a large extent however, the use of such plot device to carry the story to the finish line didn’t prove worthy at all. To be honest, I keep asking myself the essence of devil worship in the tract. Let me belabor the story here for you, but don’t feel disappointed if all the plot asides not useful to the story are not told. We simply pick the grains from the chaffs.

Sandra (Nadia Buari), an uppity clean cut young girl is forced by her mother to join her in the Wednesday prayer-worship at the church. At the church, while prayers go on inside, Sandra nonchalant, sits outside and toys with her cell phone. Inside, one of the worshippers fall swoon on the floor obviously taken over by the demon but manages to enter the spirit of Sandra and provide her gateway to the underworld. In the underworld, Sandra is betrothed to a demon who won’t allow her marry to humans. He kills a suitor who meets Sandra’s mother asking for Sandra’s hand in marriage. 

Having buried one suitor, burial or concern for the death of suitor not shown in the movie, Sandra meets Bob (Emeka Ike) the same guy who sacrificed his mother to the devil for the sake of getting rich in the Warriors of Satan. Without a glitch, Bob marries Sandra and except for occasional sneezes when Sandra’s underworld husband, the Demon visits him in his office, the marriage continues unabated.

Sandra did not have any child with Bob but she did have two girls with the Demon, as we see her feeding them in real life but lets them vanish into nothingness before Bob could enter the living room. In the last scenes of the Followers, the Demon airlifts Bob from in the arms of Sandra as they lay asleep in the bedroom, and deposits him by the way side at the thoroughfare in the heart of the city, while he takes Bob’s place by Sandra. The film ends.  

To be honest, I feel disappointed when the curtain went down on this movie. Unless part 3 might be in the making, I could call this a cliff-hanger resolution. What powers Bob might have possessed that makes him not killed by the Demon like did the first suitor, and there’s  not a single confrontation between Bob and the spirit world. This here makes the story flat. No intensity. Nada.

Pastor Jude’s flirtatious and sexual gestures toward his female followers in the church are used understandably as an exposition. But even in the face of such device, the scenes and incidents are so long that they take on a life of their own. This movie would have hit the mark if there was to have been a confrontation between the gods of the underworld as is in the Trojan War over Helen. Pastor Jude would have inherited Bob to redeem his wife Sandra from the grips of the Demon. In speaking structurally,  we would have enjoyed the essence of the followers if there had been open war of the gods over their human interests, and not their non-sense in the picture.

By Ali Baylay

Cast: Van Vicker, Chika Ike, Desmond Elliot, Tonto Dikeh. Screeenplay: Chidi Chijioke. Director: Ikechukwu Onyeke. Sky Movies Ltd.

“They are from decent christian families aspiring to be university graduates but after admission, they find out that it is not all rosy.” that’s how the sales pitch at the back of the scabbard of the dvd of  Before the Rain goes. While intensely watching this flick of university kids with my twelve years old daughter, she made a remarkable observation that would have totally escaped my critical viewing eye: “Daddy, your African university campuses look overgrowth and shuddy,” she complained. In most cases, I stood in defence of our age old Africa, and blame it on the bias of western media, but this time I was cornered.

There in front of me on the screen, in a major Nollywood production, the principal location of a story of university students on the campus of Namdi Azikwe University, are overgrowth and unkept fields, squalid environment, classrooms with  ricketty desks that don’t measure up to a primary school in today Africa. If  the right location adds up to the beauty and believability of a movie, Before the Rain’s location doesn’t pass.

That brings us to the story itself. Before the Rain is supposedly a story of Mercy (Tonto Dikeh) and Anita (Chika Ike-she would have been smashing without the fake thick eyelid which did not march the color of her eyebrow). Both leave home in a beat-up old car, evident of a poor background, on a trip to stay on a university campus. On campus, Anita and Fabian (van Vicker) soon fall out when he discovers that Anita has similar disease his one time girl had. Mercy has a series of run-ins with the Social Lady of the campus and at one point her gang  jump her and trash her (No campus securities?). Mercy absconds from campus and comes back a different butt-kicking no-nonsense gangtser, who can have Anita’s boyfriends at will. Motive, your guess is good as mine.

Anita cries a lot in this film, but in the end laughs the last laugh, when Raymond (Desmond Elliot), who had saved her life once by taking her to the hospital and both  fall in love later, brings his father to ask Anita’s hand in marriage. Like they say in screenwriting classes, if you can’t get much out of a character, kill it. Mercy ends up going to jail, and society lady ends up on the floor of her pad, dead with a bullet wound to her forehead. Before the Rain is more about Anita, hence she survives  the campus chaos around her unscathed.

Before the Rain falls, there is thunder, a distant murmur followed by a sparkle of lightning in the sky, the tropical cloud gathers hurriedly, there’s paleness everywhere, the chicks hurry to their coops, marketters gather their wares. And the rain comes and it pours. Was there rain in Before the Rain? I guess not, for the parts of this film do not come together. There’s no rhythm established so that there could be form, shape and climax building up tension and exploding it.