NWY presents Rachel Edwards, Oparango Victory, Emmanuel Ifeanyi, Story, Pearl Wats; Writer, Blessing Ire; Director of Photography; Executive Producer, Pearl Wats; Director, Okey Ifeanyi. © 2022.
The title of this movie is in pidgin English, meaning ‘I am there for you.’ I stumbled on I Dey for You like I did Omo Ghetto: The Saga (2020). The lead characters have rudely built statures, Funke Akindele Bello and Pearl Wats, and are similarly funny. However, I will choose Omo Ghetto over I Dey for You. Omo Ghetto has many activities that keep your eyes glued to the TV screen. It is a borderline comedy but a human story as well: A woman from a well-to-do family living in an upscale neighborhood got to smoking marijuana and hanging out in the ghetto neighborhood and befriending all riff-raffs, ranging from picking pockets to peddling drugs on the street with Askamaya Bees (women’s gang), or waging gang warfare that always sent someone to jail or prison. The problem between Omo Ghetto (Funke Akindele Bello), Lefty, her screen name, and her family mounts when she romantically gets involved with a kingpin called Stone (Deyemi Okanlawon). In the end, there is an open confrontation between the Askamaya Bees and Stone’s gang.
I Dey for You is formulaic by the writer’s design. In Omo Ghetto, a girl sacrifices her happiness for a loser and a good-for-nothing boyfriend. I Dey for You is a two-partner gang of thieves looking out for each other (like Damon and Pythias, on the out-of-this-world friendship in Greek Mythology). In the opening scene, Joy (Pearl Wats) harasses a little girl shopkeeper while Patrick shoplifts a tote bagful of goodies from the shop. Now, the writer introduces two notorious thieves on the street in a downtrodden side of town. Mainly, Joy initiates the theft and is later joined by her I dey for you, friend, Patrick. They both always end up in the ghetto, on a cheap mattress, on the floor, in a barren bedroom, and share the day’s loot. That is the world in which they lived. Well and good.
When a car hits Patrick (Maurice Sam) almost to death, he ends up in the employ of a well-to-do younger woman, Amie, as a driver. She appreciates him introducing Joy as a sister he wouldn’t abandon, and she is also hired to work in the same household as Patrick. Cunningly, they both share the same bedroom. Aren’t they adult brother and sister? The partners in crime change their lives by a hundred and eighty degrees. Things are looking up for a change versus their hustling days in the ghetto. You see Joy adulating Patrick in the likes of Jeff Besos, even as she can’t get the mogol’s name right. She is liking the new Patrick. Patrick’s Boss, Amie Madu, has an eye for him, though. She must be holding back. Then, the Boss Lady’s insolent elder brother, Fidel, stuck on drugs, alcohol, and Ashawos, has an uncanny eye for Joy. Love comes in many colors. Remember?
I am not trying to draw a parallel between I Dey for You and Omo Ghetto. But whereas Omo Ghetto starts as a movie belonging to the slump and scum of human experience, I Dey for You is striving to change the personalities of its characters: criminals as they professed to be, but after one bout of an incident (Patrick being hit by a prosperous inheritor’s car) life changes for them from there onward. One thing with melodramas is that writers take you through rigmaroles, twists and turns, like in real life, things nature throws at you–good or bad. Sometimes, you hold your face down in defeat and shame, and other times, the same God throws a light in your way: Voila! You are a man again. It’s like telling us, brothers and sisters, never give up. It is what Patrick is feeling now in his employer’s household: a warm and cozy bedroom, enough food to eat, and good pay at the end of the month. But….
Patrick is afraid and careful in his new driving job and fears Joy will mess things up for him. She already has one count when she steals her boss lady’s necklace. She is forgiven, but Patrick warns her sternly not to repeat the habit. By and by, Patrick helps his boss lady from a scammer boyfriend who is about to milk millions of Naira off a deal that would have benefited the scammer boyfriend instead of the boss lady. Patrick gets into her good grace. Conversely, the boss lady’s brother has an eye for Joy. He admires her street parlance, demeanor, and friskiness. One that can stand to anybody. And why not? She is street tough. She has escaped from a mob. Imagine: a motor tire thrown round her neck, doused in gas and touched off. Patrick takes the heat for her. Joy reminds me so much of Mercy Johnson when she goes out of her element and blasts the street pidgin in anger, for instance, Kopiko, her screen name in Passport (2022). Fidel goes shopping for her. In her ladylike dress, Patrick doesn’t want to see Joy dressed up by another man. Maybe a hint to the viewer that these two characters have their hearts in the same place we do not know yet. In the last scene, Fidel and Amie are eavesdropping. In the room, Joy and Patrick hug each other, and Patrick says, “Only you a don see for my life. Only you I don see for my future. I don love you since the way we dey like this. Since the way we dey small.” (holding on to her) “I love you.” And Amie barged into the room before they could kiss—a funny and embarrassing scene.
At this point in my analysis, I would like to recognize NWY movie house as one of the oldest in Nigeria. They came along with Nollywood as if they were born and bred on the same bed in the woods of Nolly. The NWY logo stuck with me like I was stuck with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) lion mascot. As a little boy at Roxy Cinema, in Bo, Sierra Leone (me at Ahmadiyya Boys Secondary school) for most matinees, I would tuck in the red velvet cushion chair comfortably and expectantly for the coming growling lion on the screen. Oh, I loved the sound of that growling lion! The drumbeat and the flute sound introducing each episode, unspooling a roll of film on the screen, are moments I hold supreme in my thoughts of NWY movies. You sense Nkem Awoh and Patient Ozorkwo having it in the yard and wrestling over food money. Those were Nollywood vaudeville days, and the shows were downright funny. Nowadays, in Nollywood, myriads of countless movie houses crop up everywhere, only to die a few years later or morph into something else. NWY is still strong and producing, though it could not be as fast as expected. We all are surviving.
I would have to take a closer look at the formulaic nature of the drama that doesn’t sit well with me. Assuming Joy and Patrick are lovers or will have feelings for each other at a certain point in the story. We understand the fact that both characters are dejected by society since they lost their parents (don’t bother the circumstances). They lost their parents and have only themselves looking out for one another–I dey for you. It strikes me as a surprise that the two leads will suddenly, out of a jealous burst by Patrick, let us know he is in love with Joy. Naturally, such incidents occur in real life, but we have the right to snippets of such future occurrences in drama. We must have caught them kissing somewhere or even in dialogue, inform us they were not siblings. I am not impressed with the writer’s denouement. Completely unsatisfying.
Then, two, long after the movie has faded, one would gaze at the fuzzy credits on the screen and ask oneself, then what? What happens to Patrick and Joy when Amie discovers that Patrick and Joy are lovers? According to the private conversation between brother and sister, standing by the car in the garage, there’s a pall hanging over their happiness. They are hurt because the boss lady had an eye for Patrick and her brother, too, for Joy. And what was the dramatic fallout between Amie and her scammer boyfriend? So far, you will be wondering what the fate of these two liars in this household is. Oh, don’t sweat it. With such a cliffhanger denouement, the story is headed to an old Nigerian movie culture–Part 2. Reason? I Dey for You starts as a comedy. Maybe we should have let the comedy play out a bit, or at least ¾ of the entire show, before we entered serious matters–Patrick and his boss lady falling in love and Joy and the brother. Of course, it may have been a melodrama (a girl swap, for certain), but we sure would experience the dynamic character dimensions they created from the slums to a class they never dreamt of. My take!