Faithful Betrayal
Faithful Betrayal starts out as a story of a young girl (Clara) who falls in love with a widower her father’s age. Her parents are quick to accept this mysterious suitor and the relationship is consummated with a low profile marriage ceremony. Barely a week after the wedding, Clara’s husband is almost paralyzed after a fall in the bathtub. Eventually, Clara takes a boyfriend and he’s employed to assist her father in the family business. When the husband relapses into a coma, he is found suffocated and nearly strangled to death.
Collaboration is as delicate as an Igbo mother conceiving a girl child for a father in need of a son. All artists, especially writers are egotistic, and most collaboration projects haven’t survived because of the egos of partners, though Faithful Betrayal did.
One thing I discovered about Faithful Betrayal is its unsteady theme. In the prelude to the film, a detective is on the phone with her boss reporting an imminent plane crash. I sat up on my sofa looking forward to a fantastic Bruce Willis Die Hard type of thriller. Nope!
The story opens with Clara bringing a suitor home to her parents for the first time. The tension and comic nature of these scenes prepared me for a lesser thrill, but again I looked forward to an African version of Guess Who is Coming to Dinner. Nope again!
About an hour or more into the story, Clara brings home a boyfriend to run the family business. And a desperate boyfriend who would murder just to get ahead in life. When the husband is found nearly strangled to death in his bed, all fingers point to this crazy boyfriend. Nope!
The detective in the prelude who appears during the opening credits and disappears thereafter shows up again as an investigator of this crime. But the manner of her investigation, the tone, the accent and insolence of Detective Fletcher in Agatha Christe, got me believe that all along I have been watching a crime fiction.
Character development is essential to screenwriting. If a character has murderous traits, the screenwriter must feed viewers snippets of that side of the character as the story progresses. But to turn the story without setting the appropriate character traits makes it unbelievable.
And I’m still undecided: Is this a romance or a Who-Done-It? Please tell me.
OPEN LETTER TO THE WRITERS
Dear Pascal Amanfo & Chinedu Ayanwu,
Collaborating on Faithful Betrayal must have been rewarding. It’s enormous fun when writers are of the same mind. One writer conceives the idea and tells a friend. Bang! Lights go on in the head of the other and both of them toil for weeks or months on end breathing life into the characters and lives they create. Eventually, they give birth to larger-than-life onscreen personalities like Genevieve Nnaji, Muna Obiekwe, Alex Usifo Omiagbo and Kofi Adjorlolo as evident in Faithful Betrayal. It is a wonderful union.