Most great movies are defined, maybe,
propelled, more like, by the trifecta of tropes, stereotypes and archetypes.
These three continue to recur and define three of the movies made by Kunle
Afolayan, from Figurine to October 1st and
now The CEO.
The other English language movie from his
oeuvre, ‘Phone Swap’, even though evincing elements of the trifecta, is
eliminated from consideration because it is a comedy.
Kunle Afolayan, son of Ade Love, has produced
5 feature length movies in the space of 10 years.
Four years earlier, in an interview with this
writer, Mr Afolayan had scoffed at the use of the term, new Nollywood, which
now seems ironic because he has become the poster boy of that new Nollywood, a
term that encapsulates what Nollywood should aspire to; big budget features
with international collaborations and superior technical quality.
To return now to the
trifecta; Mr Afolayan’s recent movie, The CEO,
rides the trope of Reality TV to deliver a masterful movie. The premise is
simple and familiar to every cable TV subscriber.
TransWire, a telecoms
company with footprints across the African continent is seeking to replace a
recently departed CEO. Five top executives are picked from across Africa
to take part in a strategy boot camp run by Dr Zimmerman, a very wooden
Angelique Kidjo, who is clearly in the movie just for her star wattage.
The five are Kola, a
Nigerian who, to continue with the Reality TV analogy, would approximate to,
considering his carefree and blasé attitude, Ebuka, quaffing Guinness stout in
the first edition of Big Brother to grace our screens in Nigeria.
There is Eloise, the
Ivorian with a sick husband. She is reluctant to take up the challenge but
prodded by her husband, she comes to Nigeria where an indiscretion leads to tragedy.
Jomo is Kenyan. An
inveterate gambler, he has been filching money from his company’s account.
Scared of being found out, Jomo’s paranoia leads to tragedy.
Yasmine is Moroccan.
Based in Nigeria, she has been fingered in a deal gone sour and the authority’s
interest in her leads to disastrous consequences.
Riikard is the South
African wunderkind. Cocky and without a care, he says he is in it to win it.
And then there is the
talented Lala Akindoju, who despite flying under the radar as the mousy HR
executive, delivers a wallop by movie end.
But the winner of it
all is the Nollywood returnee, Hilda Dokubo fresh from a tour of duty as a
government appointee. Her police detective role is invigoratingly fresh and
recalls not just Sadiq Daba’s Inspector Waziri character in October 1 but also Frances McDormand’s pregnant
detective character in the Coen brothers’ vehicle, Fargo.
It is proof of
Dokubo’s star power and superior talent that even though she delivers almost
all her lines sitting down, she grabs our attention solely on account of her
voice and facial expressions. When she says ‘Sit your yansh down’, one can feel
the weight of exasperation and authority colliding as one.
The most obvious
trope is that of the Reality TV, where the characters bear out various
stereotypes; the swashbuckling Nigerian with arms thrust out as if he owns the
universe, the cocky South African with a chip on his shoulders, the flirty Moroccan
charmer sleeping her way to the top, the hard drinking Kenyan and submissive
francophone West African wife.
But it is the
archetype that drives the movie and which leaves the discerning movie goer
seeing the three movies as an extended meditation on the contemporary human
condition, one that is not obviated by his casual references to our deepest
existential and primordial fears.
The three movies are
defined by a quest, a seeking-after something and there is always a culprit or
killer hiding in plain sight. Kunle Afolayan also manages to throw in a dash of
the supernatural, which begins, usually, almost as a practical joke but with
deadly consequences; the figurine that keeps appearing, the X carved into the
chest of the female victims inOctober 1 and the game of musical chairs which
sees losers losing their lives in The
CEO.
The questions are
always there; where is the figurine coming from; what does the X mean and how
are the deaths related to the game of musical chairs?
As Africans, the
temptation is always there to explain away the conundrum as a supernatural
occurrence, a fetish consequence. And it is easy to see why. Kunle Afolayan
grew up steeped in the Nigerian movie tradition of the supernatural and the
fetish. In his movies, there is always a nod to that atavistic essence. But it
is a homage paid with a wink. His audience is being had and he is complicit in
the deception.
What now emerges is a
movie that adopts a very modern trope in explicating an archetype as old as
antiquity. The CEO is both Reality
TV and yet a philosophical treatise and business primer that could very well be
required viewing in business school. It riffs not just on ethics and
professionalism, leadership and responsibility, but also on public relations
and crisis management.
Dr Zimmerman is
unto something when she says “idealism and pragmatism are not birds of the same
feather.”
But it is Wale Ojo as
Kola who has all the best lines from “Oyibo, you are not my broda,” to his
sharp riposte to Dr Zimmerman which elicited applause to wit:
“the CEO must be able to keep what he does in the boardroom separate
from the bedroom.”
In proving his
progressive mettle, Kunle Afolayan, as he did in Figurine and October 1, shows
again that we remain prisoners so long as we allow ourselves to be shackled by
our primordial fears, a sentiment that is echoed by Riikard when he says “I
don’t believe the psychobabble crap.”
Set in the idyllic
locale of Inagbe resort, there is, aside the obvious thematic similarities
already mentioned, a noticeable similarity in the pacing of his movie. The pace
of Kunle Afolayan’s movies is often sedate and languid but never languorous.
And then there is the
Chinese angle. Napoleon once wrote: ‘Let China sleep,
for when she wakes she will shake
the world.” That day is here and Afolayan, in
putting Cantonese in the mouth of Kola (Wale Ojo), is signposting an imminent
reality, a time when Cantonese or Mandarin would become the language of
business even in Africa.
Kunle Afolayan has
delivered another major movie in The CEO,
which he is marketing as a Pan-African movie. Deep within the core of his
continuing success as a Nigerian filmmaker lies the challenge for Mr
Afolayan; for his next movie project to grab the attention of the discerning
viewer who is now on to him, our director must best himself.
His next movie must
pack a punch and distance himself from what is beginning to appear like a
template.
By
Toni Kan
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