Mahla Films & Chika Lann Films Production present Gil Alexandre (Bruno), Arlete Bombe (Mia), Rashid Abdul (Boss), Laquino Fonseca (Tony), Tomas Bie (Americo), Candido Quembo (Paito), George Amade (Paito Boss). Antonio Forjaz/ Dario Fonseca Producers; Nurodine Dauda, Director; Director of Photography, Pipas Forjaz; Script by Brian Tilley. © 2018
Redemption is not a movie out of this world. It is the same run of the mill Nollywood-Ghallywood crime film. Yet I have to review it because we can’t concentrate on only Nollywood and Ghallywood. Our web title is African movies…, and therefore no African country should be left behind. We are in the ghetto of the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique. As I said, this film isn’t unusual. It is ghetto. It is violent. And at a certain point, insensible but acceptable as a gangster film. You’ll enjoy it if you shut your eyes and senses to the gruesome display of blood and gore. We are in Slow Country territory.
Bruno (Gil Alexandre), a sure semblance of Nollywood big hitter, Sylvester Madu, returns home from Mabutane Penitentiary after four years. His mother died in his absence, but he has a one-year-old baby, Mia (Arlete Bombe), bears for him while she visited him in the pen. You can sense the urgency in Bruno to get back into business, honest business, by the resolute face he portrays. He chain-smokes; something is stingingly gnawing at him. Like Madu, Bruno never shares a genuine smile. And even when he does so, his face still betrays him. Bruno has let down his mother and caused her lots of headaches that must have sent the old lady to her early grave. Now that he’s back, he wants to do the right thing.
He gets a job in a junkyard, where he spends his day and goes home to Mia and the baby. Life seems okay until the bank officer shows up with a notice. They are about to repossess the house if the property owner doesn’t pay back thirty thousand dollars loan owed within a month. This is Bruno’s only inheritance, and not even the ghost of his mother can forgive him if he lets them take it. In this house, he was born.
Then comes in an old crime pal of him, Paito Boss (George Amade). He is hungry to get paid, and he can be vicious. Bruno does not want to have anything to do with it. As a matter of fact, Bruno’s wife wants them to move from the neighborhood to South Africa, where they were once, lest the criminals corrupt her husband again. It is late. Paito Boss offers Bruno three thousand dollars, a loan, to start paying the bank, to revert the foreclosure on his inheritance. Soon, Paito Boss offers him a bigger job that could pay ten thousand dollars. Bruno could use ten thousand dollars as a reasonable down payment on his mother’s house.
At the start of the film, we witness a man in the patio of an abandoned house, whose hands are tied behind his back, and shot by Boss (Rashid Abdul). The man is later doused in gasoline and set ablaze by Castigo, the Boss’s assassin. That is how ruthless the organization Bruno gets to do business with and the same people Mia warns him about. When Mia discovers the three thousand dollars Paito Boss gives Bruno, she packs up and leaves. She smells of danger and Bruno’s involvement with criminals. The job is to kidnap a young rich woman, but Bruno and Paito and Paito Boss are told they kidnapped the wrong subject when the kidnapping has been successfully done.
Not really. It is on TV: “The sister-in-law of the well-known businessman, Mustafa Bacar, has been returned to her family after being kidnapped for three days. Our source tells us that the amount paid to the kidnappers as ransom was around one million US dollars.” Bruno and his pals are not having it. Americo, the organizer of the kidnapping gang, brings them a couple of thousand dollars. They are not satisfied. They have been fingered by Americo or the Boss. Someone has to pay.
Bruno and his pals want to kidnap the mafia Boss (Rashid Abdul) one afternoon after a Friday prayer. In the middle of the plan, they instead kidnap the Boss’s father successfully. Yet, from here on, the plan fell apart. First, the Boss shoots and kills Americo as he is investigating Paito and Paito Boss about the Boss’s father. The Boss’s killer, Castigo, who doused the man in the patio, kills Paito. Mia comes upon the scene, sees the shooting, and runs, dropping her baby’s hospital card. The killer goes after her.
Boss’s father escapes from the hideout but is later found and brought back to the lair. The old man died in the shelter, but Bruno thinks he can still pull the stunt. Paito Boss and Bruno meet with the Boss for the ransom, and both decide to meet at the abandoned cinema, and there’s a shoot out. Boss gets killed. Paito Boss shoots Bruno and makes away with the briefcase to the car. Bruno shoots Paito Boss in the car in the driver’s seat and claims the briefcase. At his house, he discovers his wife has been killed by Boss’s assassin. His daughter is alive in the crib. The briefcase holds nothing but white sheets of paper.
Redemption, whose Portuguese title is Resgate, in case you come across a movie of that title elsewhere, hardly stands to its name. Bruno comes back to his wife and daughter to find peace after four years in prison. We are not given to know the crime he committed to earning him four years of incarceration. He had hardly rested when he got himself involved in the most heinous of crimes-kidnapping and murder. And in the process, he lost his wife. To go by the title, 5, you keep asking who Bruno redeemed in the story. He only got lucky the assassin didn’t see his daughter in the crib. He could not even redeem his inheritance from foreclosure. We shall be comfortable calling this “Bruno’s Fatal Ruination.”
Bruno did not achieve the desired goal of redeeming whoever and whatever, to worth the film’s title. Still, he sure carries the narrative to the end. Let us look at his believable acting style. In the style of Sylvester Madu (Bank Business), Bruno’s resolute and mean face in the film shows focus. We sense that in his kisses with Mia. He does so with the intensity comparable only to the heaviness of pain in his heart, his mother’s loss, and the chances of losing his inheritance. His actions encapsulate the hermetically composed script with not a window of flaw.
I observe the film uses a Bob Marley montage. If the lyric’s use was to rob in the title’s veracity, I believe it is not in sync. Bob Marley’s intent in those lyrics is to celebrate the free man. This revolutionary man has broken or will break from the shackles, all restraints to his natural development, mentally and physically. Like Van Vicker (Battleman) valiantly surviving the gruesome war in Liberia only to come home to wallow and drown in a murky pond because of domestic affairs with his wife.
This crowdfunded $350,000 project garnered 3 wins and 8 nominations in awards including, the African Movie Academy Awards in 2019 for Antonio Fonjaz. The production started in 2017 through 2018. Like every small budget and private production, finance was hard to come by. In surplus, though, was the sacrifice and endurance of everyone who took part in the project. I can give it to Brian Tilly, the writer and producer, Antonio Forjaz and Dario Forsenca, for parsimoniously using film mechanics in the form of dialogue and direction to bring such a powerful story to the screen.