Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
All about that disappointment
camera as character and how it can operates within and outside the boundaries of the story is what makes his work so captivating.
Couple that with a keen eye for compelling cinematography and you’ve got one of the most exciting visual storytellers on the continent.
In his latest film All About Love this, however, is not on display. Yes, there are genuine moments of cinematic flair in the technical aspects of the film but the story falls far too short that even the attractive images cannot salvage it.
The film, which stars Nomzamo Mbatha, Katlego Danke, Zenande Mfanyana, Richard Lukunku, Chris Attoh and Leroy Gopal is about a love triangle, or perhaps I should say a love pentagon. We see five adults flow in and out of relationships.
The tropes of backstabbing, revenge and regret bubble up repeatedly in predictable ways.
It’s a difficult thing to describe because it’s a film whose story is about love but the ideas that drive it are vague at best. In cinema there is historical time as well as narrative time. The latter in this film was played with in ways that border on the surreal.
At some point I was wondering if Ugah was making fun of the tropes and mishaps that often plague “African films” as far as narrative sense and subverting them. After a while, however, I realised that something had gone wrong here.
The film feels misplaced. Because it has so many cultural lines to try and balance, in an attempt to be something to everyone, the film ends up being nothing to anybody.
The failure of All About Love is that it tries to beautify some of the aesthetics of Nollywood and transpose them into a South African context. The over-the-top acting, the underwhelming multiple story structure and convenient narrative turns, all converge to create a cine- matic disappointment.
By the time the whole thing was over I was left cold in my seat. I could not even summon the strength to be harsh on the film. Because I imagine the people involved in it were disappointed in the outcome.
I was hoping they would at least have had the dignity to Alan Smithee themselves in the credits. But they didn’t and I guess that is no surprise, All About Love is a film defined by poor decision-making.