A3 Studios present Bimbo Ademoye (Morenike), Timini Egbuson (Laolu), Saffy Bello (Regina), Screenplay, Mannie Oiseomaye; Story, Bimbo Ademoye; Director of Photography, Lawrence Morgan; Director, Great Van Edochie; Producer, Grace Onyia. © 2024.
It is a popular proverb that, The Last Straw is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. That is so true. It must be heavy, and unbearable; inhuman at its worst, as to break a camel’s back. Camels can bear lots of yoke for their masters. But when the proverbial camel breaks under the yoke of her master, they are at the point of revolt. Of my eighteen years reviewing Nollywood, and African movies in general, with almost five hundred films published on the African Movie Star platform, the most exploited themes are mothers-in-law/fathers-in-law insertions and manipulations of the couples influencing the make or break of the relationships of their sons and daughters, leading mostly to devastations and unbelievable disasters.
To wit:
In Nwosu Richards’s Screenplay, Beyond Secret (2011), pp. 297-298, Nollywood Movie Reviews Vol 1, Tonto Dikeh (Ifeoma) and Vincent Opurum (Henry), both a well-to-do couple had everything that nature could endow mankind in case of wealth but denied them offspring. The mother-in-law pesters them about grandkids. They went unorthodox: Mike (Muna Obiekwe) RIP, their employee, a virile young man must have sex with Ifeoma for pay. It’s funny when Vincent had to stay in the room, as Mike was having sex with his wife. Mike must strictly do a job and nothing more. Ifeoma conceived a girl, but the mother-in-law still pressed them for a boy child. Long story short, the in-law catches Ifeoma and the hired hand in the living room, on the couch, while in her ninth month of pregnancy, with the second child. Abomination! It is a scandal the couple couldn’t contain.
This brings us to The Last Straw, a story untold in Nollywood history. Regina’s (Saffy Bello) daughter Morenike (Bimbo Ademoye) is married to Laolu (Timini Ebguson) yet down on his luck. The mother-in-law persistently urges Laolu to find a job and warns her daughter to protect her finances from him. Laolu is sincere with Morenike if only her mother could understand he was faithful. For the time being together with Morenike, she never entered the kitchen to do anything. He prepares her breakfast, does the plumbing in the house, and does domestic chores, while he continues to put in proposals for business concerns with banks. No luck.
Regina sees not the good side of Laolu but the fake side of him as luring her daughter into a dragnet of crime to get away with her money. No, to Egbuson this is no Breaded Life (2021), where he teamed up with Bimbo Ademoye, the first time. Here, he wants to prove himself responsible, and hence, he trudges along and fights throughout the movie to set up a business outfit for himself, though the gods are not on his side yet. Regina can’t find his way. I felt for the young man in a scene when he called her “mother.” She looked the young man in the face and said, “I’m not your mother.” So callous that retort was, and even creates a teardrop or two for anyone, any husband of any mother’s age to deny you motherhood. That is what she said, that is what Regina says to Laolu, the husband of her only daughter, Morenike.
In a moment of truth in the story, Laolu must stand up to his mother-in-law when he can no longer stand the torment, degradation, and disrespect Regina gives him, and moves out. It takes a heart for him to stand to the almighty and self-righteous and insolent Regina. She was damaging his self-confidence, and that was killing him slowly, so, he packed a few things and moved in with his business partner. Immediately after Laolu leaves the weight of the household chores falls on the maid who practically doesn’t have household domestic chores experience. Morenike must stand up to her mother because she starts missing her husband.
I won’t wholly blame her. In life, either we are running from something, or something is running after us, as proclaimed in Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe paradoxically feels that pursuit is also chasing us down. The phrase denotes a warning for us to note that chasing the external pursuit of life can almost leave you empty of life because you always leave behind a space that needs refilling. Regina leaves behind a space that needs refilling but never cares because she was hurt. And she won’t be satisfied until she has made her daughter fill that space, she thinks Laolu couldn’t feel the void of her baby’s father who had run off on her. Remember the law in physics: there’s an opposite reaction for every action.
Regina had fallen head over heels in love with a grifter bar-runner for whom she had lied to her family about his disgraceful profession––bartender; “Your dad was always insecure, that I had more money than him, and kept chasing one pipe dream after another. Yet I got pregnant with you for him, and thereafter, vanished out of my life.” She continued with the lie that Morenke’s father passed away while he had a woman elsewhere with whom he had kids. News of his infidelity and financial ruin caused her father to have a heart attack and die. Such a disappointment hurts her today; hence, it is hard for her to accept Laolu. “And I swear to this day, I won’t let no man come between me and you,” Regina concludes to her daughter.
Morenike couldn’t take the absence of Laolu, and she had to fetch and bring him home. Regina overcomes her fears and now realizes her son-in-law is honestly in love with her daughter. She cooks and prepares a table before them but remarks, “There’s your food, I spent too much money to prepare that.” Notoriously mindful of spending. She must have engineered the business prospect Laolu was promised by the bank. In Elevator Baby (2019), Timini Egbuson (Dare Williams) appears in a leading role with Saffy Bello (Mrs. Williams), a Thriller/Comedy. A proud young and wealthy man and an expectant pregnant Toyin Abraham (Abigail) got caught in an elevator on a weekend. To resolve the dilemma of assisting the mother with childbirth, Dare, like Regina in Last Straw, must seek reconciliation with his stepfather, (Yemi Solade), a medical doctor, he never had respect for. Toyin, Egbuson, and Bello get everyone cracking in Elevator Baby, in the human experience flick. Here, however, she pressured the young man to the point of suicide but reconciled in the last scene of the movie.