By
Toyosi Onabanjo
With most movies, people want answers to two questions: How good is the story? How well does the movie tell that story? With period pieces, people ask a third question: How well did the movie represent the period in which it is set? Did it nail or miscast the era’s politics? Are its characters wearing era-appropriate clothes? Do the characters speak in a language that carries the nuances of that era?
In this epic period piece directed by Kunle Afolayan, Oyo Ile in the 1600s, where the first part of the story is set, comes alive and is mostly believable. There are bald, stationary guards bearing curved-blade swords, women hunched over boiling clay pots, perpetually haggling villagers, earthen huts and walls, tribal marks stretching either vertically or horizontally across sweaty cheeks. Everyone in this movie, royalty and commoner alike, traffics in proverbs. “Obedience is better than sacrifice,” a minor character (Yinka Quadri) says. Interesting – a character in 17th-century Yorubaland quoting a line in the Bible’s Book of Samuel. How so?
The movie revolves around a cloth weaver and chick-magnet, Saro (Kunle Remi). We first meet him when he comes to Oyo Ile for the first time, hoping to find work prospects. Instead he finds warmth in the experienced loins of an older woman (played by Sola Sobowale, surprisingly and gratefully sans hysteria). A series of events lead Saro to the king’s palace, where he is at once taken by Queen Arolake’s (Bimbo Ademoye) beauty. She is the king’s dissatisfied last and youngest wife who feels out of place in the palace. Soon she and Saro begin a forbidden romance. As with such romances, one can tell that it will end badly for one or both of the characters.
It does. The illicit couple are found out and the villagers beat Saro to a pulp, leaving him for dead, with a teary Arolake cradling his corpse, recalling in the viewer’s mind Michelangelo’s Pietà. Suddenly a ground hornbill, called akalamagbo in Yoruba, swoops in. But this is no ordinary bird; it has the power to either revive a dead person – if it finds the person undeserving of his death – or to allow them stay dead if it deems otherwise. The bird finds Saro deserving of death and is just about to condemn him when Arolake, stick in hand, swoops in, shooing the bird away, the winged creature leaving behind its amulet with which it works its twin miracles of condemnation and resurrection. Now in possession of this amulet, Saro and Arolake wander into another village where their ability to raise the dead raises them to kingly status.
Before the movie gets to this point, however, it nearly drowns itself in a morass of trite details. The viewer, one suspects, would have little patience for the cat fights between Arolake and the king’s other wives, a redundancy that adds more minutes than is necessary to the movie.
This is not Afolayan’s first historical or mystical movie. October 1, set around the period Nigeria gained independence from Britain, is a historical picture; Irapada and The Figurine both deal with mystical subjects. But it is The Figurine that is closest to Anikulapo. A love story animates both movies; a narrator opens both movies; characters in both movies, in a fit of Promethean defiance, steal from the gods what does not belong to humanity – Saro and Arolake, the akalamagbo’s amulet; Femi (Ramsey Nouah) and Sola (Kunle Afolayan), the eponymous figurine believed to bestow both good and bad luck to those in possession of it.
What Anikulapo has which The Figurine lacks is better cinematography. What The Figurine has which Anikulapo lacks is moral complexity. Sure, Anikulapo gives moral lessons, in an in-your-face manner I should add – usually it’s the characters wisecracking in didactic proverbs; one time, the music score says outright, “pride goes before a fall” – but moral lessons aren’t the same thing as moral philosophy.
The most obvious moral problem a story like this presents is whether or not humankind should have the power to defy death. What would a world in which such was possible look like? If no one is dying and humans can beat back natural selection, what does that portend for the ecosystem? In one scene, one thinks Anikulapo is headed in this morally complex direction – Saro brings an aged woman back to life and she asks him, “Who sent you?” Instead, the story winds to a different street.
Actually, the story does not wind – there are no plot contortions. It trails a linear path, relying on flashbacks to hold the viewer’s gaze. The only problem is that these flashbacks are hardly needed since they provide no illumination, merely restating information the viewer has likely not forgotten. Again I bring up The Figurine, because in the movie one sees how skillfully Afolayan uses flashbacks at the story’s tail-end – when Ramsey Nouah explains his convoluted scheme to a disbelieving Funlola Aofiyebi – to provide cerebral pleasure to the viewer and bring the movie to a satisfactory closure. Flashbacks in Anikulapo merely make the movie longer than it ought to be.
All great epics have the viewer sympathize with the heroic protagonist. Even when the hero sins, because he has been made fully human he enjoys the viewer’s goodwill. The only thing Saro, this movie’s protagonist, elicits is disgust. We know he is lecherous; we know he is boastful; we know he is a thoughtless husband; but we know nothing of his good virtues, aware only of the one-sided tableau that Shola Dada’s screenplay gives us. This failure of character study is why when Saro teeters on the brink of tragedy, the viewer hardly cares if he will survive it or not.
Afolayan has made a movie with a grand spectacle. But one wishes that he settled for a more ambiguous moral universe.
Toyosi Onabanjo is a freelance technical and entertainment writer who lives in Lagos.