‘The biggest problem with Kunle Afolayan’s new movie October 1′ – by Toni Kan...

 

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....