Ant Hills Studios presents Niyi Johnson (Dapo), Tina Mba (Iya Dapo), Dale Odele (Papa Dapo), Lilian Osoro (Ifeanyi), Amaechi Muonagor (Okoro), Kenneth Okoli (Chijioke) Blessing Onuwuke (Okoro’s wife). Director of Photography, Richard Mabiaku; Screenplay by Rita Onulurah; Producers, Bunmi Ajakkaiye, Victoria Akujobi; Director, Niyi Akimolayan. ©2016.
“Yoruba? Ones who eat palm-oil? Yoruba!” That is the condescending question, in The Bridge, Mrs. Maxwell (Tina Mba) asked her daughter, Stella, on the issue of different ethnic marriages. Disaster struck her only medical doctor-daughter, when her car hit a tree in the pouring rain at night, on a thick forested rural road in Yorubaland. Her husband could not believe the explanation. He instead has the preconceived belief that it was a Yoruba conspiracy to liquidate his Igbo daughter from marrying the Prince. He plotted to kidnap the Yoruba prince and buried him alive, for which his wife confessed to the police, and he got arrested. Both lead players ended dead. Tragedy!
Here, Mba (Iya Dapo) trade places for a Yoruba housewife with an only son, Dapo ((Niyi Johnson), who wants to marry Ifeanyi (Lilian Osoro) an Igbo woman. But here in Meet the In-Laws, the story managed to end not with tears but laughter and a toast. Meet the In-Laws is not a high-stake narrative. Thank God! Fact is, the tribal anger and hatred are not deep-rooted.
Here is the story, if you don’t mind. Young Yoruba Dapo goes job hunting in an office one day, and an Igbo, Ifeanyi falls into his eyesight and sweeps him off his feet. Love starts that same moment without much ado. We see them in a restaurant drinking shakes from the same glass, on the phone with each other, helping paint another’s room amidst jokes and laughter, and hanging out on the beach. When all the hype is over, Dapo proposes with an engagement ring to Ifeanyi.
Ifeanyi shows the ring to her mother. She’s exhilarated and breaks into a happy Igbo dance. She’s thankful Ifeanyi has got a man to marry her. She has got saved from the initial worries of all mothers for their offsprings. They would not want their daughters to become the bag lady in the family, knocking on doors at one family home and another and harassing little sisters and their husbands for carfares to another family member. They want a home, even a mansion for them. Getting a man to put a ring on it is half the blessing. Knowing the man and his background and ethnicity favored ethnicity, could be the crowning jewel. “Don’t worry, mama,” Ifeanyi childishly assures her mother.
The Dapo household, too, has a similar experience when the news broke of Dapo engaging a woman to marry. Iya Dapo dreams of the woman for her son who could be found in the kitchen whipping the beloved Yoruba staple: fufu and bitter-leaf soup cooked with stockfish and lots of palm oil. She would want to see her son put some meat on those bones of his, have a Yoruba plum round face, and a boy child is incubating in his wife’s womb. With those, she can peacefully go on to her grave. “An Igbo person in my house? Impossible!” Iya Dapo yells at her son. Dapo and his father jump out of their skin as she screams.
Film or drama generally works beautifully with conflict, and it could be men against nature, like storm, flood, or wildfire. And most interestingly man to man. The conflict between two opposite and different characters in a drama sizzles like a chicken cube in a peanut butter stew. When the viewer sees such opposing figures, she immediately goes to bat for either of the characters—secretly wishing that the desired choice achieves her desired goal. That is the determining factor in story composition. When you hear the warnings of Stella’s father in The Bridge, you expect a fallout sooner or later: “You will never see that boy again. And you will never again mention his name. And you will never bring up the matter of marrying anyone else except someone from our tribe, from our culture and our tradition.” With the lack of such tension in Meet the In-laws, the story falls flat. It is a kind of luke-warm drama.
Here in Meet the In-Laws, the father of the would-be bride opposes the marriage, and at the Dapo family home, Dapo’s mother is the problem. She would not let her son marry an Igbo woman. Before both families could meet, they have already condemned the union as a no-go because of differences in ethnicity. If two people from each side of the family could be so overbearing, the writer builds up tension and expectation in us for the time both parties would meet in person; If they ever meet. You might guess, it is a replay of Who is Coming To Dinner, or Meet the In-laws (2012) and Meet the In-Laws (2018). This title is commonplace in the film world.
Finally, the two families meet at the Okoro family house. “Okoro, Okoro, you thief!” Iya Dapo, screams out at the would-be father-in-law. “Dapo! Dapo! You ashawo!” Okoro, screams back too. The two carry on the name-calling, to the bewilderment of all in the room. Iya Dapo stands up to jump on Okoro. She keeps on and on yelling about something no one understands and could not simmer down. Everyone in the room is agape at the performance of the two in-laws. Papa Dapo has to haul his wife from the gathering and take her home, avoiding the shiny machete Okoro was wielding against his would-have-been mother-in-law.
And here comes the suspense. What got the two strangers so angry and incensed at each other. Have they met someplace before? Just as Iya Dapo’s son was suspicious of his mother, having had, maybe, some secret rendezvous with his future father-in-law when they were young, so Okoro’s wife (Blessing Onuwuka) was. Why the anger, why are the two going at each other like kids, and why the name-calling? Iya Dapo couldn’t explain the reason for her anger, even as she commented once that, “all Igbos are thieves.” Okoro, too could not tell his wife and daughter the genesis of the relationship between him and Dapo.
They have to. The onus is on either of them to clear their names or tell the families the genesis of the hatred. Both Dapo and Okoro grew up in the same neighborhood. They were both young. Dapo, a budding businesswoman and pretty and can hang out to the fares on weekends. Okoro, a ladies’ shoe salesman had sold a fake shoe to Dapo with which she had an accident and ruined her evening. Harassments after harassments for a refund, Dapo finally gave up, but she never forgave Okoro for that dishonesty. The reason she wouldn’t want her son to marry his daughter.
Both Dapo and Okoro stood their grounds against the marriage. Young Dapo and Ifyeanyi eloped and traveled to Ghana and got married. Now the parents they left behind in Nigeria are worried. The two families had all the differences in the world, the palm-oil-eating, and crooks business ethics, differences, but now that it comes to losing their children, they had one thing in common: They wanted their children back in Nigeria. They called them to go back home, and Ifeanyi and Dapo formally got married in their presence, and the most unexpected gift for the occasion was the same type of shoes with which Okoro had cheated Iya Dapo. Okoro seals the peace.
Conflict in this movie is not well entrenched, as we noted in The Bridge. There is a subplot that gave The Bridge life. Augustine (Ken Erics) was desperate for Stella, and he had her father’s blessings, him being Igbo. Didn’t we see him almost have a brawl with the Prince at the airstrip? Outside family contention in Meet the In-laws, which was minimal, got the story go to sleep. In Meet the in-laws, the writer didn’t allow or accept Chijioke (Kenneth Okoli) the Prince charming in Hibiscus Hotel to step in between Ifeanyi and Dapo. The camera shots and edits are hurried and chaste as if the director was rushing to put the film in the can so that he can get out of town on vacation.