Two sides of Nigeria: raucous and restrained
Photo: Sophie Okonedo, Clarissa; BFI website
Daniel Nelson
Two new films show wildly different imagined Nigerian lives: one raucous, the other restrained.
Both are adapted from books: The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, Lola Shoneyin’s debut 2010 novel, and British writer Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, updated, re-worked and re-located to Lagos as Clarissa.
Baba Sega’s story is about a successful self-made businessman with three wives and seven children who takes a young, attractive graduate as No.4. The introduction of Bolanle triggers a riotous conflict in the household as the jealous wives plot to stop the intruder from ruining the secret lives they have made for themselves under cover of harmonious polygamy.
Bolanle has another problem: she fails to produce a child. The patriarch is upset. How she deals with this threat to her marriage triggers an even bigger crisis, which slowly spirals out of control.
It’s an exuberant, colourful film full of vivid characters and touches on a geleful of issues including gender discrimination, rape, women’s sexual pleasure and family relationships. Despite its extravagant humour and an off-putting moral tone towards the end, most of the characters have enough humanity to make them interesting.
The joy, vigour and physicality of Babi Segi is a million miles away from the carefully controlled cool of Clarissa, which focuses on a garden party for the Lagos elite. Refined manners, well-spoken conversations, fine wine, elegant clothes. While preparing for the event, Clarissa (an utterly brilliant Sophie Okonedo) quietly instructs her staff about a badly hung painting, a forgotten tablecloth, a tasteless pergola. She tuts to herself, but doesn’t raise her voice. She runs a tight ship but controls gently.
A slight tremor disturbs the surface order when an old flame turns up, the author of a successful book followed by years of writer’s block. He’s still in love. There’s musing in the air: what might have been had they stayed together and she had not married a safe, respected man: “We all put our great futures behind us … and settle.”
Flashbacks flesh out the story, together with a dramatic parallel tale of a soldier, the partner of a seamstress who has worked for Clarissa. He fought Boko Haram in the north of the country and is in denial about the stress and trauma he carries as a result. It gives the film’s serenity a killer jolt but sits uneasily with the main story.
Perhaps the violence and the serenity are linked together for the same reason that Clarissa, when asked What happened, why did she choose to settle for a comfortable path, replies: “Nigeria, life.”