Before The Rain

Before The Rain

 Sky Movies Ltd, Presents Van Vicker (Fabian), Chika Ike (Anita), Desmond Elliot (Raymond), Tonto Dikeh (Mercy). Screenplay, 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 shoddy,” she complained. In most cases, I stood in defense 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 Nnamdi Azikiwe University, is an 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 gangster, 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, marketeers 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 afterward.