Koga Entertainment Production presents, Bhaira Mcnwizu (Eugenia), Blossom Chukwujekwu (Lanre), Nse Nkpe Etim (Ajiri), Femi Jacob (Chidi), Story, Biodun Stephen; Screenplay, Kehinde Joseph/ Biodun Stephen; Director of Photography, Lukman Abdulrahaman; Producer, Biodun Stephen; Executive Producer, Christopher Jeyibo; Director, Oyefunke Fayoyin. © 2014.
If you need to understand this movie, I beg, please watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). That is because Who’s Afraid… is the Encyclopedia Brittanica for The Visit. It is the key to opening the door to your understanding of the movie and the underbelly of its rhetoric. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) Features four characters and four only: Hosts: Elizabeth Taylor (Martha), her husband Richard Burton (George), and the visitors: George Segal (Nick), and Sandy Dennis (Honey). Simple plot: In a drunken stupor, husband and wife chastise each other and expose their dirty secrets to perfect strangers, but later, turn on their visitors and by the end of the visit, not one character has a secret left.
Ajiri (Nse Nkpe Etim) and her husband Lanre (Blossom Chukwujekwu) are too boisterous neighbors, who live a carefree life in an apartment that one could call at first sight, “What a dump!” They wake up with a smoke (marijuana) and drink and sandwich. They repeat the same lifestyle until the next day. The next-door neighbors are Eugenia (Bhaira Mcnwizu), and her husband, Chidi (Femi Jacob) who are introduced to us as the direct opposite of Ajiri and Lanre. To get a glimpse of their lifestyle, the scene opens with the couple on either side of the bed, on their knees, with their heads bowed down saying prayers before saying goodnight to each other. In the morning they are in the bathroom brushing their teeth in front of the face basins and as if choreographed, after which, they kissed, say good morning to each other later dress, and step out the door to work.
Chidi’s jeep is blocked in by a sports car, obviously by the neighbors next door, and luckily for him, the key is still in the ignition and he moves the car from his way. That evening as the couple are in bed reading, laying side by side, the serenity of their neighborhood is broken as Ajiri and Lanre engage in catfight and end having loud and raunchy sex over their car, right underneath the couple’s window. In another instance, Ajiri throws a bottle and breaks the neighbors’ window.
Ajiri and Lanre visit Eugenia and Chidi over to beg for their misbehavior the previous night. It’s all a hilarious engagement. At first. Though unserious as they are, Chidi and Eugenia are dead serious and playing the uptight adults, looking down on the two carefree folks, but soon find that there’s uniformity in human character. When the question arises about the loud sex Ajiri and Lanre always have, Eugenia complains that the reason she doesn’t enjoy sex is that she was circumcised, and she bursts out crying.
Tempers between the couples simmer a little, and that takes us to the second stage in the visit when Eugenia leaves for the restroom to freshen up, and Ajiri follows her there, and they talk woman to woman, as George in Who’s Afraid... could ask, “I wonder what they’ll be talking about?” Ajiri and Eugenia disclose to each other how they met their partners, while in the other room, over a shot of liquor they share in tumblers, they divulge in similar history of how they met their spouses. Chidi has done some wild sex in his life too.
In the third stage of the visit, the couples now have come to share personal stories but haven’t got to know each other formally, they all move over to a dining room and all sit, and everyone introduces themselves firsthand. Lots of discoveries are made. That Chidi and Lanre attended the same school but never got to know each other; that Ajiri doesn’t see future in her husband’s music career but loves him anyway; that Ajiri once cheats with another man on the night of her bachelorette party; Ajiri uses dildo in the afternoon when Lanre is out because she can’t get sexual satisfaction from him. Lanre’s ego is hurt when he learns that his wife says she’s a nympho and supplements him with plastic.
Eugenia is not what she proclaims, and that she’s been a big lie all her life: a prostitute in Europe where she met Chidi, and she’s done drugs and drinks and drinks even to date, to the surprise of her husband. Asked how she’s been getting away with the smell, she dilutes it in black coffee, she says. Chidi proclaims himself the greatest fool to have missed all this side of a woman who claims to be so pious, and uppity.
The disclosure of Chidi killing a man as an initiation into a cult is not the only shock on his part, but the dam breaks, when at this juncture in the confessions, Chidi’s telephone rings and Eugenia answers only to hear Ada’s on the phone. When pressed, Chidi confesses about his outside relationship from which he has twins. All the people in this room have all sinned. Aren’t they? They have lied, cheated, murdered, prostituted, and deceit, and here they are, all in one room. Serendipity?!
In comparison with its American counterpart, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The Visit, except for one of its main characters named Eugenia, almost rhyming with Virginia, and an attitude like a wolf at first is in a harsher tone than the latter. Characters are however flipped. George and Martha, the hosts in Who’s Afraid… live in a clustered environment. They smoke and drink a lot. But, in the movie, The visit, the visitors, Lanre and Ajiri live in a clustered environment, chain-smoke cigarettes and marijuana, and live a chaotic lifestyle, while their hosts Chidi and Eugenia live in a clean non-smoking and serene life. I found out that the conversation in The Visit isn’t as shrewd, intense, rhetorical and funny as that of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with all that witty dialogue. However, The Visit appeals to the African sense of humor and rhetoric.
As a reviewer, I’ve so long carried the nagging doubt as to how Nollywood or Ghallywood do the billing system of the actors and actresses in films. In Hollywood, there’s no better resume, and selling points in getting roles, than the billing of actors in films. One who gets robust acting records gets the top billing and could likely get more pay. That’s why we always see, ‘starring,’ ‘co-starring, ‘and ‘introducing,’ in the credits. A trademark I miss in most Nollywood films. It really stands out to me while reviewing The Visit, and I keep wondering how did Producer Biodun Stephen come up with giving the top billing to Femi Jacob over Nse Nkpe Etim? To me, It would have been Femi Jacob, co-starred by Nse Nkpe Etim, or vice versa.