Material Girl

By Ali Baylay

A VENUS PRODUCTION, STARRING:Yvonne Nelson, John Dumelo, Kofi Adjorlolo, Amonebea Dodoo, Gavivina Tamaklo, Brenda Osei Bonsu; Production Manager: Loius Saah Acquahman; Story: Abdul Salam Mumuni: Screenplay: Phil Efe Bernard; Continuity: Maxwell Awuni; Editor: Dapo-Ola Daniels; DOP: Adams Umar; Associate Producer: Roger Quartey; Producer/Executive Producer: Abdul Salam Mumini; Director: Frank Raja Arasi; 144 mins. C2009.

I believe Material Girl is more like a treatise in philosophy 101, than a simple drama. The movie is replete with the word ‘moral, morality’ to a point that the drama takes a second place in the presentation. I do not think Material Girl is a movie about good versus evil as the theme suggests. It is a movie based on evil versus evil. All major characters are existentialists by creed. To vindicate this claim, Cassie in one of her tirades declares: “life doesn’t give to those who ask, it gives to those who demand”.

The story goes like this: Cassie (Yvonne Nelson) gets paid after sleeping with an older gentleman in a hotel room and runs from the scene with a briefcase she thinks is full of money, asks a lift from a car passing by and later steals the driver’s cell phone. She’s disappointed by the discovery that the briefcase holds nothing but documents. She later visits her bedridden sick mother who would not take her daughter’s ill-begotten money for her treatment.

Hon. Jayke falls in love with Cassie after finding out she rescues his wife Jessica (Amanobea Dodoo) from collapsing outside their mansion. They both enjoy their secret rendezvous. Hon. Jayke buys Cassie a house and even  helps procure a government contract for her. Meanwhile, Cassie’s mother is on her deathbed in a hospital where the doctor refuses her treatment because she does not have money. Cassie’s younger sister prostitutes herself to her uncle just so she can raise money for her mother’s medical cost, but ends up with a bounced check. She still tries to steal money and got beat up and ends up in comma in the same hospital their mother is admitted. After pulling out of the comma, she goes and kills the uncle.

On the other side of the spectrum, Cassie is having a ball, shopping and basking in the good life as the Honorable Minister asks his wife Jessica to dissolve their 29 years of marriage. He wants to marry Cassie and live happily ever after. Unfortunately, his only son, Greg, character played by up and coming Gollywood star, John Dumelo gets in town from America and Cassie dates him. Jessica, hires a private eye to investigate reason for her husband’s estrangement, while Hon. Jayke too hires a hit man to kill any one that has come between him and Cassie for her strange disappearances. With not enough time left for both parents, Jessica finds out her son and husband are having affair with the same girl-Cassie. “I brought a serpent into my home”, she laments. For Hon. Jayke, he’s now living on a borrowed times beacause the hit men hired by him are presently stabbing  his only son to death, caught in the arms of Cassie.

The last Koffie Adjorolo’s movie I reviewed was Sleepwalker in which a woman, (Genevieve Nnaji) three times less than his age ritualistically murders him in bed,while chasing after his lost (lust?) youth. In Material Girl too,he’s in search of the same lost youth, a friend asks him why going after a younger girlfriend, he says “not doing it out of nostalgia, I’m simply making a discovery”. Here’s such a cruel discovery in the hands of his one time movie daughter in Princess Tyra. “The wishes of mortals the gods command” as she would assert in Princess Tyra. Here, Cassie carries with her the same air of insolence to the point of fooling all the people all the time to her selfish gains but only this time stopping short in the face of a morass she helps orchestrate.