Adore Akande (Toyin), Abolad Anthony (Doctor), Hilda Dokubo (Mrs. Okwara), Ukeme Ekpe (Gynecologist), Moses Akerele (Enigma), Chris Iheuwa (Sam), Pamelerine Ayodeji (Young Toyin), Eku Edewor (Mrs. Oyeyemi), Director, Walter Taylaur, Alexx Ekubo (Femi), Oris Erhuero (Sunday), Nse Ikpe-Etim (Uche)© 2023
A Sunday Affair is an affair to remember. Every celebrity wedding, funeral, or baby shower must always have an ugly and shameful drama we won’t let people know. We experienced in How to Ruin Christmas (2020), in which the bride’s deadbeat father appears at the occasion as an uninvited guest but manages to sleep with the bride’s mother one more time before being driven away before he causes more scandal. We laughed out loud at the funny incidents that erupted during the funeral of Chief Daddy ((2018). It was out of this world.
During such occasions, like weddings, most spinsters who have almost passed child-bearing age, but still hope to have a child, one day, are hopeful for a man, a strange man who does not know their history, to fall into their path. They will gloat, that youthful gloat we all experienced with the first sight of a strange girl in our town.
Then Femi’s wedding takes place and the groom’s brother from America is standing opposite the sister of the bride and both are maids of this celebrated wedding. He, a charlatan as they come, married with a daughter, but presently his eyes dancing in his head checking out the Nigerian spinsters at the wedding. His aggrieved wife even hand him over to a woman he was having for company. “Are you trying to make me look stupid…? You couldn’t just keep it together for a few hours?” She’s ready to walk away but abruptly turns. (to the woman). “You want him? You can have him. He’s all your’s.”
Uche (Nse Ikpe-Etim) takes notice of the strange handsome tall man and even notices the strange man’s wife grumbling about her husband’s waywardness and eyes for the women. She sees a weakness in the relationship she could exploit.
This guy has a stature, and physic, Dionysus could envy. The guy has a chest and a height, short little me can be jealous. He notices, that most of the spinsters at the party want him laid and he is all for it. Before long Uche can’t wait to take this strange handsome guy away in a backroom while the bride and groom are busy dancing away rumba, even before her sister can cut the cake. Later both of them enter the cake-cutting scene with a happy demeanor. They have gotten out of their systems whatever was eating at them.
Uche (Nse Ikpe-Etim), the owner of Genesis Gallery, is sponsored by a pot-belly sugar daddy, Sam (Chris Iheuwa), with whom she is tired and fed up. She no longer even dabs the usual cold kiss on Sam’s cheek, and he’s getting aggravated. Then Toyin (Adore Akande) a childhood friend of Uche pairs with her in this wedding when they both happen upon the charlatan (Oris Erhuero). The guy takes both of them by storm. Their disposition change and step and fall over each other, pretending, and not letting one person notices the other’s feeling for the charlatan.
Sunday and Toyin happen to ride a train to Ibadan together, and a charlatan Sunday is, he dupes Toyin into initiating an affair with Uche’s best friend as both get stranded en route back to Lagos. Upon their return, Toyin, couldn’t take baby steps in her relationship with Sunday. Now Sunday lays Toyin and she postpones her IUI procedure––Aisha in Nafsi (2021). Since their youth Uche and Toyin had taken “pinky swear” to each other, and the “pinky promise” is a bond between them.
Since Toyin abandons her Intrauterine Insemination (IUI ) procedure and with a one-time lunchtime stand with Sunday in a hotel room, she conceives and carries the pregnancy to term, only she didn’t survive labor though she managed to put a baby girl to bed. Uche inherits the baby who was fathered by Sunday.
Femi, “Yo….Bro….Can’t sleep? (beat). Is it um them?”
Sunday, under his breath, “Yes….I never felt the way I’m feeling now for anyone.”
Supporting actor, Alexx Ekubo in A Sunday Affair plays a remarkable role to remember. He may have played the lead here as he did in the princely role in Zero Hour (2019) when he and RMD had to go at it mano-o-mano. There is no such conflict here anyway. One thing he did here though, is he introduces us to Sunday’s real character as a weak man, incapable of taking decisions for himself. Imagine the memorable scene in the living room, a beautiful shot too; Alexx is in the background, and Oris is in the foreground, almost breathing into the camera. Alexx asks Oris about the two lovers in his life––Nsi and Adore:
Femi, “So you think you’re in love?”
Sunday, “Yes.”
Femi, “with both of them, or?”
Sunday, “Yes, with both of them.”
I can vouch for the mechanics of A Sunday Affair with not much ado, hang its hinges on the pinky-finger bond, Uche and Toyin had in their youth, at the pier. They have been friends since 1999. And in 2009, coming of age and at the pier, when Toyin refused to get together with a boy she had been wanting to meet with:
Uche, “…then he can piss off. I’m staying with you.”
Toyin, “Don’t go crazy on me now…You’ve wanted to get together with him for months.”
Uche, “There’ll be other guys, Toyin, but there’s only one us….Pinky promise? You know you want to. You know––
(holds out her pinky finger to Toyin)
Haven’t most of us in our youth taken silly oaths with our loved ones? I once bonded with a girl that way. We pricked our pinky fingers each with a needle and sucked the blood. She sucked my blood and I sucked hers. We both swore never to separate. Put my feet to the fire, I won’t name the girl with whom I took such oaths. It was all a big joke. But boy Toyin and Uche were serious.
They laugh at that teenage girl’s laughter as they entwine their pinky fingers. That pinky swearing and pinky promise both girls made to each is the symbol that bonds them and carries the story through and through. We witness Toyin passing the wedding bouquet to Uche which she accepts. If I could quote the Pastor at the wedding: “No greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for a friend.” Toyin lays her life down for Uche with whom she leaves her child.