Avanti Films presents Blessing lungaho (Ricky), Hanna Wajinku (Amy), Torre Wachanga (Leah), June Njeanga (Stacy). Written/Directed, Jennifer Gatero; Cinematography, Moses Osidiama; Producer, Dantez Nwendwa. ©2023.
I’ll bet my last dollar on this movie if it isn’t the product of Sarah Hassan of Just in Time (2021) fame. No, I have never been able to forget about that production—a Spring through Summer film when everyone is out the door and wants to go places, tropical blooming flowers wafting their fragrance in the air and romance in young hearts. A little cookie of a screen gem, Hanna Wanjiku, got me to fall in love with An Instant Dad. She’s cute, and with another ten years added to her age, she’d play Genevieve Nnaji of Nollywood’s remake of Caught in the Act (2008), when the original Nnaji may have retired into the sunset.
At Cotton Up, the film opens with a soul-stirring East African, Kenyan especially, rumba dance tune. True. It transports me, evoking a sense of nostalgia and joy. An Instant Dad takes us on a journey into the life of a deadbeat dad, Ricky (Blessing Lungaho), who, due to heart-wrenching circumstances, disappears from his secondary school sweetheart, the one he had left pregnant. The story takes a poignant turn when he reconnects with his ten-year-old daughter, Amy (Hanna Wanjiku). Before this, he was a carefree playboy, living a solitary life with an empty fridge. Yet, he continues to hang out with his friends downtown.
I’m talking about “we went to the same primary school, secondary school, and college—all childhood chums, rowdy and rough with girls who came around them. The glasses on the table before them are always filled with rum, gin, and whisky. Water? No. They are young and affluent six-figure guys, the IT crop. They make lots of money, drink a lot, and girls, girls, girls. Then, this one morning, Ricky is in Marlon Brando’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) tank T-shirt. He’s excited, expectant of a girlfriend in a police uniform; then the doorbell rings, and he rushes there, still excited. He opens the door and stands before him, the most incredible kid girl. Both freeze. Note: watch the faces of Both Ricky and Amy gazing at each other, we shall have created a metadrama out of that scene:
Ricky (beat), “Who are you?”
Amy, “I’m Amy.”
“Okay, good. Not your name, who are you?”
“I’m your daughter.”
“My what?”
Still at the door, chuckles, “Yeah.”
Ricky is used to bringing girls of any creed home every night and can’t even remember his last girl’s name, Sarah or Stacy. He stares at the little girl without inviting Amy in. Bachelor as they came, Ricky couldn’t believe his ears. We heard him condemn marriage and familyhood at the club last night, yet he wakes up and opens the door to a ten-year-old girl, toting a backpack, standing in the door, claiming him as a dad. Ricky must have been wild in secondary school, and now his past has come to seek him. This is his ten-year-old daughter at the door.
“Okay. Okay, Patricia passed away?”
Amy, “Yeah, two years ago.”
Jenifer Gatero, in An Instant Dad, shifts gear in her narrative. She puts a deadbeat dad who has never eaten in nor stood in front of a cooking stove, about to share an abode with a soon-to-be teenager, wakes up with different girls every morning, and at his age, let’s say thirty-five, couldn’t take care of anyone. Amy, on the other hand, recently lost her mother, and she couldn’t live with her sickly maternal grandmother. Gatero gives Ricky a challenging role in the film and pits him against an equally stubborn, coming-of-age girl who’s not only an “empath” in character but loves her dad, even as this dad isn’t ready to be domesticated or accept her. No, it is not about DNA; Ricky has never been responsible for even a pet dog, and to mind a ten-year-old is impossible.
However, spending a night or two with this thing that calls him dad was an annoying experience as it seemed to me, not him–he has never bought into this daughter thing–he is gradually warming up to Amy, though. That evening over the pizza, Amy’s good side for her dad comes out, even at the behest of her dead mother. What leverage Amy had over this man she calls dad is the constant reminder of her mother, Patricia. He soon got choked on, “Mama never let us eat without prayers, and go to bed without a bedtime story,” ‘My mother this, my mother that…’ all in reminiscence of Ricky’s once secondary school sweetheart and eventual baby’s mother, were Amy’s stringent religious household ethics—more like teaching an old dog a new trick.
Ricky couldn’t grasp this new reality; he wanted to live his best life. He’d instead give Amy over to someone or a family that could give her a better home, but he couldn’t forgo his night out in the town with his chums, the girls, and gin. “There is too much meat going around; catch me dead,” as Ricky dismisses having a wife or family. “Enjoy your life if you can, ‘cause when the wife comes along and the kids….” Another friend warned. When Ricky gets a babysitter for Amy one night, he wakes up rudely the following day when the sitter, Leah (Torrey Wachanga), his cousin in the Human Services office, brings Amy home. Ricky’s house is full of skimpily dressed women. There must have been an orgy in this household. Damn epicurean, Ricky! For once, he is embarrassed.
The moment of truth in An Instant Dad is in the scene when Ricky takes the ultimate step about his fear of Amy being his daughter. He had gotten DNA done and found this was his real daughter:
Amy, “Before I met you, I had always dreamt about you…I never dreamt you won’t want me.”
Ricky, “I want you.”
“Then there’s something wrong with me.”
“Nothing wrong with you; you are perfect.”
“Why then don’t you love me?”
“I was scared…scared that I was not good enough for you. That you are better with someone else. (closes in on her/beat). Sometimes, as adults and parents, we are wrong. I was wrong….
Almost to a whimper, “So, you want me?”
“I do.”
“You love me?”
“I do. I love you, Amy, and I will never leave you.”
It is such an emotional scene as Amy and her dad cry in each other’s arms. The interaction between daughter and dad was the epiphany that changed Ricky forever. His dynamic acting as a once carefree and celebrated bachelor takes a three-hundred-and-sixty-character turnaround. He had overcome his daughter’s constant reminder of her mother, Patricia.
A little-known Nollywood movie, Single At 40, is a Pascal Amanfo production featuring Yvonne Okoro (Tatiana). Not so much as to what happens in Tatiana’s life that concerns this story, as to how she tries to hide from her friends that she had a young woman for a daughter she had been hiding away from her friends. The moment of truth in Single At 40 resembles the scene in An Instant Dad—Ricky squirms when his friends call him names after they learn that he has an almost teenage daughter. The monologues of both leads in Single At 40 and An Instant Dad could be paralleled.
In her sophomore feature production, she worked with the director and cinematographers with the same mind: artful shots–the close-up shots of Ricky’s rush in the traffic to the hospital, choice of actors and actresses, Hanna Wanjiku, for one–and quaint dialogue that sometimes hit the ear like natural laughter from a distant night club in the middle of the night, occasionally airy, and sometimes with melancholy. In the end, the noise dies out, and everyone goes home. Ricky goes home to his daughter, Amy. At Cotton Down, all left in the air is the jazzy dance tune that I couldn’t help but sing in the rain, under the shower—an excellent family movie.