Last time I watched a Nollywood movie at the cinema and didn’t hate myself for wasting time was a month ago and that movie was ‘Half of a yellow sun’.
I have since seen a couple of Nollywood flicks after that and none of them even comes close to achieving the beautiful but-not-accurate interpretation of roles Biyi Bandele presented via HOAYS. I am not easy to please so you will need more than hype to get me to pay to watch a Nigerian movie in a cinema.
Two hours have since passed and I spent it watching ‘Being Mrs Elliot’ and surprisingly I am not mad I have wasted my time.
Hold it now, I am not comparing BME to HOAYS. That’s foolery. Trailers are enough to prove there’s a vast difference between both works. But Omoni’s film is a worthy contender for attention even though the hype was just hype.
The film ‘Being Mrs Elliot’ had the usual jealousy, misunderstandings, intrigues and the boredom that characterizes many Nigerian marriages. It also sold the idea that love is a painful yet beautiful phenomenon that can come into being from a series of oddities. It was painful that the trailer somehow gave the movie away as I correctly predicted the story line even before I saw it. However I went into the hall bearing in mind that BME is Omoni Oboli’s first effort as a producer and a director. She wrote the movie and starred in it too!
Let’s quickly run through the synopsis shall we?
The movie revolves around two women, in a simple twist of fate, find their worlds colliding with each other. Their lives are turned upside down as they meet two men, who are on a different path in life until unusual circumstances bring the women into their lives. In a maze of deception, lust, pain, jealousy and intrigues their lives are rearranged in ways that they did not foresee as they try to make sense of finding love in unusual places.
So yeah, the movie started out boring and a tad bit unrealistic (movies are allowed to be unrealistic but not boring, heck I’m paying money). I just wanted the first few scenes to pass before my salty Popcorn would finish. Almost every scene seemed to garner honest reactions from most people who shared the cinema hall with me (by the way, the Nigerian audience don’t care about rules and can ruin a movie for you). One of the scenes that got a lot of hisses was Seun’s proposal. I found it different and crazy, something definitely worth remembering but it wasn’t romantic. Unique is the word.