By Ali Baylay

It’s Mercy Johnson again! This time she’s a three-dimensional character in a convoluted story. She plays Miss Rose, a straight-jacketed English maid who has a lesbian affair with the lady of the house; then she sleeps with the husband of the house and tops it off by sleeping with the house cook in her quarters. Corporate Maid explores comedy, tragedy and lesbianism.

In this African film, the whining wife of Chris (Van Vicker) is never satisfied with the services of the maids in their marble-laden mansion. To train her maids to be staff of her dreams, she hires a trainer (Miss Rose) to get her three maids into shape. The training starts well enough as soon as Miss Rose joins the household.

It is a hilarious ride from the moment the film fades in. Then comes news of the Chris’s death in a plane crash and the comedy comes to an abrupt end. Chris’s parents intend to claim the property and his wife hurries to take charge of his papers before they beat her to it.  Miss Rose gets in the mix with a lesbian affair with her boss lady, as she consoles her in her demise.  But when the husband reappears Miss Rose lures him into bed too, and finally ends the sexual escapades in the guest room with the house cook (Charles Unoji). She escapes the mansion in shame and the movie ends.

Corporate Maid crashes as a comedy when news of Chris’s imminent plane crash reaches the household. The crash incident in the story completely reroutes this comic story into exploring lesbianism in African films. The comic stunts of Charles Inoji captivate the viewer taking us on that ride into the kingdom where we temporarily put away our worries, then boom! Tragedy strikes and it’s not even a comic type. No film captures viewers by dropping tragedy into the middle of a comedy. Especially when the tragedy occurs to their beloved star Van Vicker.

To expect the African viewer, your target audience base, to view lesbianism on screen and at the same time laugh about it is unrealistic. On first viewing it, they will likely revolt. To most it’s an abomination! In the middle of the film, I expect they would take a bathroom break or simply stop watching. The comedy is out the door, replaced by a serious social debate: lesbianism versus our African sexual tolerance.

Corporate Maid starts out as a farce with hearty laughable scenes but goes on to explore uncharted social waters that could as well be Modern African Cultural Studies 101. Better yet, let’s call this flick Desperate Maid.

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 us, is 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.

Ali Baylay/Publisher.