MM Films Production Presents: Nadia Buari (Latifa), Prince David Osei (Phil), Nash Alexi Smith (Greg), Martha Ankomah (Sarah), Franchesca Gray (Ivy), Story/Screenplay, Evans Anaelo; Director of Photography, Efe Eprairam; Producer, Lucas Edom; Editor, Samuel Owusu Asare; Director, Ken Steve Anuka. (C2013)
If I have authority to rate this movie besides reviewing it, I would have given it five stars and a half. This movie would have been appropriately named Entrapped. It has all the ingredients and reasons to be so but I’m not going to look at it that way, for I’ll be doing this classic a disfavor.
One More Night is a classic by texture. The cinematography, for instance, use of body parts in sex scenes, luxurious wardrobe, locations and directions and the appropriate use of conflict where it belongs, put so much value on this film and made it looks like a million dollar production budget unheard of in both Nollywood and Ghallywood. Since every good film has its root in the ingenuity of the writer, I commend Evans Anaelo for managing his characters and plot so well that the story has the meaning of a comprehensive essay. And I beg his pardon if my review here does him any wrong because I’m not a man enough to bring this illustrious work to the ground.
Phil (Prince David Osei) is a matchmaker who hooks his twenty-five years old sister Latifa (Nadia Buari) to a seventy years old, filthily rich, Chief Makus (George Williams) and who in turn, immediately made Latifa head of his conglomerate. Since Phil is the grand designer of Latifa’s being in the house of Chief Makus, like an oil well that never runs dry, he continues pilfering money from both Chief and Latifa. There’s even a bigger design to get the Chief transfer all his business empire and everything in Latifa’s name and then kill the Chief shortly after.
Meanwhile, Chief Makus’ son Greg (Nash Alexi Smith) arrives in town from studying abroad, and on the first tour of the offices, Latifa asks her step-son point blank, what is his favorite sexual position. To her, infidelity is inbred. As if she is joking but meaning it, she throws the heart of the young and innocent lad into flames. She rapes Greg and suffocates him with her constant sexual demands. From time to time, she’ll sneak from her marital room and catches a quick one with the son in the other room, while the seventy-five years old father snores-The Power of Buttocks. She orders the front desk secretary not to allow Greg’s girlfriend, Ivy in the offices. Since Greg and Ivy are tight, Latifa cleverly laces her orange drink with sleeping pills, the night Ivy sleeps over at Greg’s. She texts Greg to come over to her room for a quick one. Greg indeed comes over and gives her her heart’s desire.
Ivy and her feisty street runner friend, Sarah (Martha Ankomah) suspect Latifa might be sleeping around with her step-son, and the jealousy and hatred for Ivy are crushing her. Sarah concludes her suspicion when she Latifa asks her to kill Ivy for a million dollars plus airfare to go to the States. At last, when Greg’s family doctor wrongly diagnoses ivy that she’s pregnant, and Greg steps out of the relationship, Sarah goes berserk in defense of her innocent friend, Ivy.
Sarah starts the moment of truth in the story with Greg, by telling him it is an open secret that he’s sleeping with his father’s wife. He sits in a trance when Sarah leaves his office. In the parking lot, she runs into ever-hovering Phil and knowing each other from the street, they both alter a stand-up and threatening statements to each other, one in defense of Latifa and the other in case of Ivy. Sarah bounds the doctor in his chair and pinches his manhood with a knife. He confesses he lies about the pregnancy because Latifa told him to do so.
Phil and Latifa meet, and he expresses he’s running out of patience, and Latifa must pressure Chief Makus for the will, so they can go ahead and kill him. Phil says, ” you know I’m the originator of this marriage. Latifa asks, What if I don’t do what you say?” Phil, bluntly: “By killing you. You have to go by my rules.” Chief Makus, walks on Greg and Latifa in the office having sex and pretends he has a heart attack and fakes his death. For the funeral arrangement, Latifa leaves everything with Greg saying, “…….Till death do us part” and now that death has made them part, all she cares for is the will. Phil blackmails the family lawyer to change the will in Latifa’s favor, but just when the lawyer could read it to finish, Phil snatches it away ready to go when Chief Makus and the law gets there and arrests everybody.
The movie is sincere in bringing the story to a perfect close with no question or plot left hanging. The first admiration I have for the director, Ken Steve Anuka is the fluidity of motion in the film. We see him use wipes seamlessly to get to another location in a different sequence. More too, he uses and moves the story by the use of beautiful juxtapositions. The scene where Greg is in the bathroom soliloquizing looking at the camera, but at the same time sounds like he’s talking with Ivy while Ivy sits on the stairs of Sarah’s apartment talking to the camera as if to Greg, is a beautiful cinematic technique.
Then these other scenes when Latifa enters Greg’s room to cheer his broken heart, while on the other side of town, Sarah is doing the same to Ivy, mending her broken heart and the scenes interchange, and dialogues seem to refer or answer to the other characters in the other arena. Again in the kitchen, Sarah and Ivy are talking about love while Greg and his father talk on the same theme, and both separate conversations seem like either asking one another, answering one another, disjointedly. Beautiful device to hurry through the story but cleverly telling it to viewers understanding, without unnecessarily holding their attention. To western filmmaking, these production techniques are nothing but cliches, but to us in the African continent, this is new.
Prince David Osei acts in “Open Scandal with Majid Michael as the guy having affairs with his best friend’s mother. And here too he’s trying to pull a big one, with a rich family as he does so in Open Scandal. In Open Scandal, he’s shot by Kalsum Simore, but here, he’s gone too far and is going to be locked up. Nadia Buari’s character is two dimensional. She’s predictable and at the same time complex. Her character represents the type of people we find in our communities today who fight to hell to get what they want out of life. When Mr. James get fired by her because he met her and Greg in the bathroom, he says to her: “I’ll get back to you, you lovely demon.” She retorts, “ I’ll be here to play host to you, you son of a gun!”Are you sure no pun intended here as in ‘gone’? Mr. James goes away from the story after this scene.
My respect and admiration for this story are that the locations and wardrobe match the kind of story they are telling us. It would be a mismatch to present me a story about a millionaire and sees that the offices do not have dark oak desks and doors; that the layout looks makeshift and unbelievable, with electrical wirings hanging all over the place and the wardrobes do not fit or meant for the characters. It’s all about believability.