A Young Father Production Presents, Ruff Samuel (Jeffery), Tonto Dikeh (Emelda), James Gardener (Mike), Smith Asante (Dave). Story/Screenplay, David Owusu; Production, Samuel Ruff Quansah; Director, Ish Tompson. (C2010)
This movie throws caution to the wind for overweight and overworked bosses who come home, and slump in bed by their beautiful wives, and snore till morning comes. They’ll be rushing out the door with a cup of coffee in one hand and the handgrip in the other, and they’ll manage to throw kisses in the air at them wives and go. Gone from seven in the morning to six in the evening, then they’ll come back home and repeat the same circle. Snore, snore, and snore.
A quaint little story Soul Desire is. Tight script, beautiful cinematography, and Tonto Dikeh have never acted this good. She let it all out. There’s a mix of method-acting in her performance as if she had lived the experience in real life.
Here she plays Emelda (Tonto Dikeh), as a wife of Jeffery (Ruff Samuel), a successful office boss, who has it all, but she is sexually starved even as she begs and cries for it from her overworked husband. She becomes vulnerable to temptation and quickly falls for a starving artist (painter and poet), Mike (James Gardener). Himself, a gay characteristic to his being. Like two dogs in heat they have sex everywhere: In the public restrooms at a mall, and even in the living room of her marital home.
Something gives in, on her marital relations though. Her vibrancy and warmth at the door when receiving her husband from work turns into a cold shoulder. During one of her secret meetings with her boyfriend, a worker who works for her husband sees her with Mike, and when her husband fires the office worker for some other reason, out of spite, the office worker snitches on Emelda. Well, not actually a snitch but to level with his boss for his hard-heartedness for firing him, he tells it all.
Jeffery hires an undercover to follow Emelda and soon she’s photographed coming out of Icecream parlor in the arms of Mike. Jeffery confronts Mike and begs him to leave his wife. Mike in return sadistically laughs Jeffery to a clown. The shame and anger plus the sadistic laughter and provocation drive Jeffery insane and remorselessly butchers his tormentor Mike to death.
As he sits by dead Mike drinking the wine he Mike had offered him, Emelda calls (on speaker phone) to inform Mike her husband has the picture of both of them, and she wants them to meet, immediately. She couldn’t bear the silence on Mike’s end, so she comes over and sees Mike lying dead in a pool of blood. Out of breath, she rushes home to pack and is about to leave when bloody Jeffery enters and kills her too. Jeffery takes the phone, calls the law on his damn self and in the presence of the police shoots himself. Tragedy.
This movie is a glimpse of the microcosmic look at what happens in the modern African families. Before us, our fathers have helpers in the farms and come home in the evenings with a little bit of energy to play with our mothers. But today’s man in Africa is a workhorse, who alone tills the land from dawn to dusk with no time to rest. Definitely, something got to give: the bedroom.
When your heart is on fire, smoke gets in your eye, and smoke gets in the eye of Emelda for Mike and there, made fateful decisions that cost her her life. Mike’s character trait is entirely different from Emelda. James Gardener must have watched Guilty Pleasures Majid Michel’s psychotic acting when he chose the part of Mike in this movie. Mike’s performance here shows that sex brings out the artistic juices flowing in him. Hence he always crawls back to his lair and the canvass every time he has steaming sex with Emelda.
One problem I found with Soul Desire is the music. Music in this film is so loud, so unnecessary, so distracting that at a certain point I wanted to yell! And what with the music in the bedroom scene when Emelda is reading the poem? Silence in certain film scenes or even ambiance sound can be more golden when they take the second stage in the dialogue. It is a turn off when you keep hammering in full and misplaced and unnecessary songs that couldn’t contribute to the story, nor show the road map of the plot. The audience is more interested in the show and the tell on the screen than the obstructing, unnecessary loud music.
Soul Desire reminds me of D.H.Lawrence’s 1928 controversial classic, Lady Chatterley’s Lover which was both banned in England and America until 1960. It is a story about a genteel and nobleman, Clifford Chatterley, in England, hurt from the war, and wheelchair-bound and impotent. His wife, Connie Reid, secretly falls in love with her husband’s games-keeper, Oliver, with whom she continuously have sex in his cottage and the forest. They were both betrayed by the house nurse. What makes the story unacceptable in England and America is its use of obscenity and explicit sexual descriptions, like we witness between Emelda and her low-class artist boyfriend, Mike.
I can imagine a cigar-chomping producer screening this movie and at the end turns to the director and says, “Can we have a different ending than letting all the principal players dying?, Man, I love Tonto Dikeh’s acting, and I don’t want her to die. Or better yet, let her turn the gun on her husband for killing her young f****r boyfriend.” Soul Desire is a fun movie to watch, but late at night when all the children are gone to bed.