MOVIE
TITLE: October 1st
DIRECTOR: Kunle Afolayan
SCRIPT: Tunde Babalola
STARRING: Sadiq Daba, Kanayo .O. Kanayo, Kehinde Bankole, Fabian
Lojede, Demola Adedoyin, Kunle Afolayan, Deola Sagoe, Nick Rhys, David Bailie.
YEAR
OF RELEASE: October 2014.
The biggest problem with Kunle
Afolayan’s new movie October 1 is that there is almost nothing wrong with it.
The cinematography is top notch.
Yinka Edward, who handled
Cinematography, is a wizard who achieves something that is always problematic
for Nollywood, shooting a scene at night.
He handles this with poise. The
story is coherent, consistent and well resolved even though this is a movie
with alternating plot lines and big themes. The disparate narrative strands are
ultimately brought together into one whole.
The casting is excellent and whoever
made the choice of fresh-faced and Nollywood newbie, Demola Adedoyin as Prince
Aderopo deserves commendation because Adedoyin brings to the role the arrogant
swagger and insouciance of a blue blood as well as the cold bloodedness that
comes from a place not just of pain but privilege.
There is that same arrogance in
Kunle Afolayan’s directorial touch but it is more confidence than arrogance,
really, in a movie where he presents the villain to us from the get-go, yet we
sit riveted, enthralled by our doubts and inability to accept that we have
arrived at the right conclusions even as the evidence piles up that we are
indeed right.
At the screening, a lady behind me
kept saying to her husband: ‘He is the killer. Oh, he is not.’ Kunle Afolayan
also drops many cues – Agbekoya eye balling the Prince, the nightmares that
take Agbekoya’s sleep hostage, the white clad assailant – that point us to the
killer but what gets in the way is our collective sense of doubt, that stubborn
refusal to accept that which we believe mainly because of who is involved and
an anachronistic chink in the chronology of events. October 1 is a pretty long
movie running for well over two hours but you do not feel the passage of time
because the story is edge-of-the-seat gripping and oh, there is comedy aplenty.
The character of Sunday Afonja
played by Yoruba actor, Kayoed Aderupoko is spot on.
His thick Ibadan accent, tribal
marks and an uncanny ability to operate with aplomb on two parallel spheres;
the traditional, as a Yoruba man and the modern, as a policeman hold serious
sociological relevance for inquiring scholars. ‘Better to lose job than to
commit taboo,’ he tells his superior officer in jerky English as he hands-in
his badge and then when Dan Waziri refuses to go drinking Afonja says ‘Palmwine
is not alcohol.’
The movie proceeds at a sedate
almost languid pace but it is languor not in the sense of an Ousmane Sembene
movie but more in an Ogunde-ish and Cock Crow at Dawn/Village Headmaster-like
pace and this is mostly because the movie is set in a bucolic locale where time
is slow and the frenetic pace of the metropolis is alien. Here, people go to
the stream or take long walks along the dusty precincts. Life is simple and
unhurried and that is the image the movie evokes.
Why is the movie called October 1
when almost all that happens in the movie take place before that date? In a
private conversation, Kunle Afolayan confided that the original title of the
story written by Tunde Babalola was not October 1. It was ‘Dust’ in reference
to the rural setting but October 1 works in the sense that it evokes
anticipation.
Everyone in the movie is
anticipating something, collectively and individually; the coming of
independence, the beginning of a new era, the departure for greener pastures
abroad, a police man leaving for Sandhurst to become an army officer, an Igbo
father pining for justice, a town on tenterhooks waiting for a murderer to be
apprehended and a detective charged with solving the crime before Independence
Day. That sense of anticipation pervades the movie and provides it with its
emotional currency because anticipation breeds anxiety and anxiety is already
radioactive in this rural community where young virgins are being murdered. So,
in steps Danny Boy, Inspector Danladi Waziri played brilliantly by Sadiq Daba
whose thin, wiry frame works well both as character and prop. His story is a
tragic one writ large on the canvas of his body. His choice as the driven but
damaged detective is pure magic....
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