An ABC Pictures Production presents, John Dumelo (Mike), Kafui Danku (Angie), Paulina Oduro (Mabel), Adjety Anan (Dr. Jamal), Pascal Amanfo (Abdul), Eddie Watson (Kay), Cadence Akogba Akpene (Jane). Story/Screenplay, Pascal Amanfo; Producer, Kafui Danko; Director, Pascal Amanfo; Executive Producer, ABC Pictures. (c) 2013
I never wrote letters to my mother. She was as illiterate as they come. I missed that point in a mother and child relationship though. No way I could express my heartfelt emotions to her. Like this one time when I needed to take a black leather dress shoes back to school for a big impending ceremony on our campus. She couldn’t afford the money to buy my shoes, because she had spent all that the bakery offered on paying my school-fees and board. As I cried, my mother burst into tears too and hugged me. Today, I have a rack full of black shoes, of every modern design, even the ones with the protruding hard-nosed tips that make you walk like a tortoise. I wish I could write to her and tell her how things have changed for her son. But I can’t, she had long passed on.
Mike (John Dumelo) writes from his prison cell, a wall length of delusional letters to his dead mother, expressing his confessions, his regrets, and sorrows; how situations would have been corrected if they had communicated rightly. He becomes mentally deranged after he lost his mother, Mabel (Paulina Oduro), to a simple sickness that could have been avoided if he paid the medical bill. But his bitter discovery that his wife Angie (Kafui Danku), and his friend, Kay (Eddie Watson), had set him up to drain him out of all he’s got, got him enraged. In his rage and anger, he commits the most gruesome onscreen double murders Ghallywood had not experienced since Majid Michel’s, Hearts of Men (2009).
Mike is in love with Angie until his mother dies of heart failure because he couldn’t afford to foot the medical bill. Angie and Kay have been living a big lie of love and care for Mike. Mike refuses to pay his only mother’s medical bill because he wants to show love for Angie, by financing the bogus business deal that Kay introduces to him. When he shall have known that after all, Angie and Kay were lovers and that the child she’s carrying isn’t his, it’s too late, so, he kills both of them, and sits for six hours for police to come and arrest him. We meet him in the cell of his prison at the Kabita Mental hospital, standing writing letters to his dead mother, as they (he and his mother) have always done while she was alive.
Crime of The Heart (2017) says it all, but they are quick to put us in the know as to what had transpired between Thelma and Brenda. Brenda and Thelma had met long before the movie started and have personal stories they couldn’t share with no one even with us the audience. They were fraternal sisters who belonged to an organization that catered to women to get wealthy but equally destroyed their wombs not to have children. Here, in Letters to My Mother, the mother isn’t, in any way in a fraternal organization, but knows that the woman her son is about to marry is evil and dirty, who craves to make money regardless of means and human value. Mabel only writes so in a letter, but keeps it in a church vault to give it to her son, upon her death. Her son doesn’t know this and doesn’t care to know.
The theme of this movie is vengeance even as it has a minor theme wrapped up in Frederick Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead’ existential philosophy. Mike’s mother, Mabel, once a nurse in a hospital, had a bad experience with Angie on the staff and resigned. Angie was involved in a gambit which had something to do with selling human parts for money. Years later, the same Angie for whose unethical and evil behavior she resigned and ran away from, happens to be presented to her as a future daughter-in-law by her only son. She finds it difficult to swallow and to refuse her son’s wishes because, he’s ignorant of what she’s in the knowledge of, and her son is in love. She lets the marriage go along.
Amanfo’s Dr, Jamal (Adjety Anan) tells his story in the third person, quite removed. And by doing so, he assumes the character of a medical professor sent on this research, and in the process, uses many but two main points of views in bringing the narrative to us. While he uses third person limited technique, by letting each character, by dialogue and character tells us his or her role, he, on the other hand, mostly, out of his medical and psychiatric knowledge uses the point of view of the third person omniscient (play God) His omniscient role in the discovery of the content of the letters on the wall gives the story better clarity and understanding. For instance, he keeps zooming in and spending time on characters and scenes that we needed understand and zooms out to other scenes, like the prison cell where there was nothing but the forlorn look in the eyes of Mike. If we have any doubt of how he rated his characters, we bring in a scene he comments, condescendingly about the news of Mike and Angie getting married. Scene:
Mike, to Mabel, “Angie and I are getting married.”
The film cuts to the psychiatric nurse, Lucy, and Dr. Jamal:
Dr. Jamal, “Hm.”
Pascal Amanfo in The Game (2010) portrays the famous blind Greek storyteller, Homer of the Illiad, and the Odyssey, sitting on a heap by the roadside, and tells a story that covers over five years. Here as a storyteller of his own kind, he’s presenting characters in our everyday lives. Yet this time, he veered too much into the realm of existential philosophy and religion. He toys with the heavy philosophical canon of the nature of God, as preached by not Kierkegaard, Locke, Kant, or Hume but by the most controversial, Frederick Nietzsche. He mentions the name of Hitler ones, and during dialogues among his actors, we hear references to, “God is dead,” existentialism, nihilism and the meaning of existence, fate, and destiny, “what will be, will be.” These references make me believe Pascal is taking us into the deeper philosophical waters. To wit:
Dr. Jamal, looking up into heaven, “You think he’s really up there…Elohim? Hebrew coinage for God the eternal?”
“Are you by any means doubting the very existence of God?”
“Do I have the right to challenge the philosophies of men?”
“God is not a philosophy.”
“What if he’s just an ideology?”
“God is not an ideology…Blasphemy!”
“Tell that to Hitler’s bone. I’m just a man searching…”
“Then what exactly are you in search of?”
“The truth.”
“What truth?”
“The essence of life, the basis of faith; the virtues of hope; the secrets of desti-ny.”
Pascal simply argues here that preexistence is older than essence; that each man was born with a preexisting destiny, his star written in his hands, and here on earth, we achieve not more and not less than that star. “The fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars…” Shakespeare, Julius Caesar.
The story is weaved around Mike, and on his left is existentialists Angie and Kay and on his right, religious Mabel and Jane. And in the middle of this two is the innocent Man (Mike). What the story is about is that destiny is paramount in the lives of man, and no matter what time Mabel spends kneeling in front of the crucifix, to save his only son from Angie, the devil, what fate has been marked for Mike and for her Mabel will come to pass. It is a little wonder that Mabel who alters parting words to Angie, “Destiny forbids me to set my eyes on you, ever again,” would come to spend the end of her life in her company as a mother-in-law.
The story structure is the perfect Pascal mode of presenting a narrative of this nature. He tells this story from the viewpoint of a third person quite removed. And only through medical research are we able to learn the events before the story started and during the lives of the people in the story and the fate that befalls every one of them. However, as an omnipresence storyteller, he is siding with the existentialist, Nietzschean philosophy than that of religion. He simply reminds us that for mankind, there’s no way out as in The Birth of Tragedy, by Frederick Nietzsche. The story brings us to visit the philosophical question ‘does life has any meaning.’