Olive Nwosu | Egúngún (Masquerade) / 2021

good and nice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Olive Nwosu (screenwriter and director) Egúngún (Masquerade) / 2021 [14 minutes]

 

It’s always strikes me that some short films whiz by seemingly in seconds giving their lack of depth and complexity, while other far more substantive shorts appear almost to have been feature films, despite the short time is has taken to tell their stories. Olive Nwosu’s illusive Masquerade is the latter kind of film.

    The film begins purposely obscure as we see a handsome well-dressed woman in the midst of a traffic jam in Lagos, where a dancing masked figure refuses to remove himself from in front of the car she drives. She honks the horn in frustration. What she is doing there or where she might be going is a mystery. 

      As is her sudden appearance at a Christian church service, after which the pastor, delighted to see her back, praises her mother and wishes she might hear more from her daughter, the woman to whom she is speaking, Salewa (Sheila Chukwulozie).

      Salewa waits outside the church for the appearance of a younger woman of her own age, Ebun (Teniola Aladese) who walks past her, the film’s heroine following her through the market, losing her, and coming upon her accidently face to face.

       Joining Ebun on her motorbike, in momentarily delight of simply being able to touch, the two speed away to Ebun’s traditional Nigerian mud and reed “cone on drum” hut with her husband Ladi (Momoh Pius Oshogwemoh) inside. Ladi has evidently had a serious accident, sporting a bandaged head and eye patch. He is graciously pleased to meet the woman his wife has talked about so often and whose mother evidently worked as a maid in their house.

     In the middle of the conversation, however, his eye seems to pop-out, and she is highly disturbed by the incident and—as we soon discover, equally disconcerted that her friend has married such a man and that his mother worked for them—Salewa runs of. Telephoning the driver of the car we earlier saw her in, who evidently is a family member given that she asks him if he ever recalled such a woman as Ladi’s mother employed by the family. When Ebun soon attempts to follow her, asking her to return, Salewa runs still further off until she stops in front of the tree, Ebun finally catching up.

     In brief flash-backs we have already perceived that as young girls Ebun and Salewa were very much in love with one another. And now their adult conversation obliquely refers to that friendship while apparently steering away from the deeper subject of a possible lesbian relationship, which is clearly what has brought Salewa from London, where she now lives, back to Nigeria.

     Just as Ebun catches up to the adult Salewa, we see an image of the children together, with Ebun saying “I love you,” and for a moment it reverberates into the present, as if she were speaking those words now. Yet she clearly isn’t any longer in the world that Salewa his kept alive in her memory, and the women can now only discuss the outlines of their former friendship.

    Like the others before her, Ebun again inquires, with hushed tones of reverence, about Salewa’s mother. But this time Salewa reacts almost angrily: “I think it’s quite strange, quite strange that everyone speaks of her as if she were Jesus, like she’s the lord and savior of all Nigerians.”

     In another brief flashback we glimpse the two girls at play, Ebun having been decorated with flowers in her hair. We don’t witness precisely what’s happening between them, but when Salewa’s mother finds them at play she angrily scolds them for their behavior, pulling the girls apart. Clearly she has come upon some childhood version of their play of love. Regarding their love for one another, the mother has clearly not behaved saintly.

     In another moment, Salewa comments that Ladi sees to be a nice man—despite her clear aversion to him. And when Ebun asks about how life is in London, Salewa explains that she too is married—to a woman.

     There is the slightest of pauses, but Ebun replies that she is pleased that she is happy, “that’s good,” speedily returning the subject of her own marriage, “Ladi is a good man. He’s fine. He’ll be good.”

      When Ebun comments on Salewa’s shaved head, the latter replies it is nice to feel the cool across it. And so the conversation, filled with the tension of a love that may have meant different things to the two of them, becomes stuffed with statements of “that’s good,” and “that’s nice,” with none of their former impassioned feelings spilling out of their mouths.

      Salewa’s ride back, Bode, soon returns, and she drives off. Her voyage back in time obviously having allayed her long ago passions. She has clearly returned to her childhood home in search and peace, and alas, has found it. Everything back in Nigeria, a world in which as a child she clearly felt uncomfortable if not terrorized, is good and nice.

 

Los Angeles, October 26, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).