Battleman

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.