Peridot Entertainment & Cinema Kpatakpata present Tunde Aladase (Ose), Omatta Udafor (Hakeem), Tarje Lien (Oldman Thorkell), Ann Njemanze (Ose’s mother), Anders Lidin Hansen (Eirik), Jenny Bonden (Sunniva), Belinda Effah (Efe), Anita Daniels (Dora). The story, Regina Udalor; Screenplay, Ifesisinnachi Okoli-Okpagu; Director of Photography, Baba Agba/Ifeanyi Iloduba; Executive Producer, Akor Udalor; Producer, Regina Udalor; Director, Kenneth Gyang. © 2018
Dunhill hotel on North Tryon Street in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, is spooked. There is a ghost on the ninth floor named “Dusty.” I heard. The Dunhill Hotel story is no Halloween story to frighten you; it is accurate. Ghosts haunt certain rooms in the hotel. Dusty can turn on and off lights in empty spaces, whisper in the ears of hospitality staff, clap, and laugh out loud in open spaces. Sometimes a regular, body-shivering cold air blows at the back of your head. Hair-raising experience. Isn’t it?
Spirits roam this earth, for real. They guard, hover, and let their presence know that they exist in another world but look after their interests on earth. And when you truly appeal to them, spirits, I mean, they’ll guard you through the labyrinthine course of life. Such is the grit that befell our lead character in this story through the help of a ghost. The human nature that establishes a company or domicile wouldn’t want to part with their interests even in death.
I’ve been roaming around, hovering over the Nollywood universe, looking for The Lost Café. This one day, I decided to check in and see what was on the menu. I smelled the sweet aroma of peanut-butter soup with which my grandmother complemented fufu. The GPS couldn’t locate the cafe; thousands of miles up the road, the damn gadget announces, “You have arrived!” “What the f**K!” I exclaimed. The location is not in Calabar but the far-flung Scandinavian country of Norway. I know straight away, I was out of luck with the peanut-butter issue.
Then appears this 113 lightweight of a girl; call her woman if you can, for I can’t. Ose (Tunde Aladase) is her name. She has a haunted, wanting, mean, and longing look about her. She’s from Calabar in Nigeria, boarded a plane to Norway to study film. Great. We appreciate our girls braving the icy Scandinavian regions to bring us the goods. Her baggage, however, isn’t exclusive to the backpack with which she arrived in Norway. She has left a lot on either the tarmac or in her parents’ living room in Calabar.
By its looks, our 113 lbs guest of honor, Ose in The Lost Café, is maybe missing Hakeem (Omatta Udafor) back in Calabar. Her eyes are wanting and longing and vacant. For what? Tell me about it. Can’t you see the rage in her? She shares a room with a discriminating and disrespectful White girl who was always contentious. Sunniva (Jenny Bonden) can’t swallow that an African girl could be a film school student and not the usual run-of-the-mill Nigerian prostitutes in Norway. “Just because you are the first Nigerian woman who is not a prostitute in Norway.” As painful that statement is, it didn’t help when Ose found that her best friend, Dora (Anita Daniels), was messing with her boyfriend, Hakeem, in Calabar. Her roommate plus news of Hakeem messing did put her out of peaceful elements.
Ose runs into a dingy cafe to avoid two men seemingly chasing her and happens to fall into the company of a mysterious Oldman Torkell (Terje Lien). After a brief introduction, he asks her what she misses about home. “What is there to tell?” “Everything. I would like to see it through your eyes.” “The sounds,” she goes on to say, and explain about the colorful functions like marriage ceremonies which she envisions for herself and Hakeem upon her return, and Calabar. In this place, everybody is in everybody’s business.
“Heartbreak Hotel, is it?”
A shot of two youthful White lovers smooshing to each other according to Ose and the Oldman’s POV. He comments on the lovers outside:
“They forget that the heart is brittle, it is so easily broken, it’s like a glass.”
“I never said he broke my heart.”
“But that my young lady is in your eyes.”
“I don’t know if I should be… heartbroken. He’s not with me.”
“Is he far away? What is it that you love about him?”
“His smile and wits, everything.”
“Everything is nothing. Smile and wit are nothing. Often we fall in love with just one thing. You describe a thousand young men that you will meet in your life.”
Oldman disparages Ose, “I didn’t come here for interrogation!”
“Aren’t you in love with him then?”
“Are you saying I don’t know if I’m in love or not? I gave him the most valuable thing that I have (sex), and he gave me this (touches necklace) as a symbol of his love.”
“So, what does it signify?”
“Well, obviously, so that I will always remember him.”
“Do you plan to forget him then?”
“He gave it to me the night we….”
Shot of two young lovers, hugging and smooshing according to the POV of Ose and her old pal. The young man has a bouquet in the other hand behind his back. He wants to surprise her.
(beat) “When I was young and fiery, I gave a woman my whole heart.”
“I’m not surprised she left you. You are just cynical and bitter old man.”
“I don’t want you to become like me.”
“That never going to happen.”
Ose walks away angrily from her old pal. The Oldman struck a sensitive chord in her. In the next scene, she’s sitting in loneliness, hugging herself and watching the world go by in a park far away. Ose calls her friend Dora and tells her what info she has on her, through Efe (Belinda Effah), messing with Hakeem. Then she made a second visit to the Café, and as she sits, her old pal, an ever-ready, brings her the usual cup of coffee. Ose apologizes for her behavior the last time.
“I love Hakeem.”
“So I did. She was my whole life. She was my everything. I thought I couldn’t do anything without her.”
Shot of the young lovers fighting and fussing with each other. According to Oldman and Ose’s point of view. The girl leaves the scene.
“We were incompatible. I was in love with my imagination. We were the wrong choice.”
“How do you know?”
“She failed the test. She left and didn’t come back for me.”
“You should have gone after her.”
“The choice to stay or to leave is always their own. Sometimes fear keeps them from making that choice. So, what are you afraid of?”
Ose holds the cup of coffee in her hands, tightly gripping it and looking away in thought as we cut. She’ll “be devasted” if she finds out Hakeem cheated on her. Upon her third visit, she confesses to the Oldman her fear. Ose’s father cheated on her mother and even witnessed one of the outrages between the parents one night. “I just don’t want to confirm that another man in my life has disappointed me.”
“Would you rather be in denial? You should trust your heart to make the right choice.”
Soon after the scene with the Oldman, Ose calls Hakeem in Nigeria and pointedly asks if he’s been sleeping with her best friend, Dora. Hakeem confesses. Ose ends the relationship. The necklace was gone from her neck, and a dinner date with Eirik (Anders Linden Hansen), her film class male friend, was scheduled. Life for Ose goes on. And on Ose’s date with Eirik, here is the spirit of the Oldman at the café in the foreground, saying:
“Good choice. Good choice.”
When I mentioned the mysterious affair at the Dunhill Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, I wasn’t adding an unnecessary digression to my essay on The Lost Café. The point I am making is that the Oldman’s appearance in the dingy café in Norway is nothing more than the roving and hovering spirit of the Oldman at the café. From time to time, spirits visit the homes and businesses left behind. The writer compresses a thirty-year history of his caring experience in the three visits Ose made with him at the café. There’s no indication in the screenplay why the spirit of a White Oldman could take to Ose—granted to accept, and a mysterious circumstance made her seek refuge in the Café to avoid the two men following her. The café experience, however, turns to a learning tree of a love affair, unburdens Ose with the question of whether to stick with Hakeem or not.
Ose takes her film class and roommate to the café to introduce her to her old friend and share the excellent choice she has made. The Café has vanished. Once dingy and motley café now replaces by a well-lighted bookstore that has been in operation for over twenty years. It is now a library. Ose takes along the picture of the Oldman with her. For keepsake?
This production used the best movie camera lenses (angenieux), giving such an overall bluish color. And that brings me to the necklace scene. It is a fantastic low-key light shot. Arty. Beautiful! I wish I could draw that scene on a 9×11 canvass and hang it in my bedroom, right where I can see it every morning upon waking up. Ose’s cute saggy breast and its tantalizing suckling black nipples shall keep me going the whole day until I come back to it in the evening. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not worshipping a 9X11 matte on my bedroom wall. I’ll say to it, in honoring mode, “thank you for my eyes to behold you again, my dear. The thought of you kept my entire day in serenity, and you steer me home with great fortitude.”