Director: Jimmy Bangura (Jimmy B)
Starring: Ramsey Noah, Lucky Lawson, Chika Ike, Martha Ankomah
Love and Lust intelligently explores the maintenance part of the marital relationship equation. Friction arises in every relationship, how we address it determines the quality and longevity of our interactions.
Lucky Lawson pleasantly surprised me with her creative contribution to this thought-provoking Nollywood/Ghallywood collaboration. Her performance did make me wonder if I had a problem with her accent. However, I now realize that her enunciation can be an issue, at times.
Lawson plays Kayla, a dutiful African wife. She supports her husband’s business, as gauchely as she can. In fact, writing construction-related proposals is not one of her gifts. After her umpteenth costly mistake, Kayla flees insults, under-performance and humiliations, to search for her true vocation. Lawson does a great job of showing what eats up Kayla.
Ramsey Noah is Kayla’s husband, Xavier. Xavier cannot comprehend Kayla’s desertion. He is determined to punish Kayla’s refusal to sacrifice her aspirations, for their financial stability. Ramsey Noah nailed his character’s difficulty in accommodating the shift between traditional and modern expectations in an African wife. Eventually, the story traps Kayla between opponents and proponents of marriage.
One camp decries the assassination of ambition in married women, while another counts the benefits of marriage. Implicit in Love and Lust is the question of whether or not marriage is the stumbling block that stunts women’s vocational development. It is in the midst of all this clamor that Kayla must learn to make life-changing decisions.
Love and Lust is not a fairy tale, it is a reality tale on the management of human interactions. Friction is inevitable in the close confines of a relationship like marriage; especially when a character like Isha, played by Chika Ike, calls out our rhetorics and exposes the holes in our theories of love. Isha is the test of many marriages and other relationships and, Ike increased the entertainment value of the film, with her ultimatums-driven character.
There are two primary threats to Kayla and Xavier’s marriage. Kayla is determining if the cost of keeping her marriage is an infantilized intellect in her husband’s professional shadow. While Xavier must rein in his urge for unrestrained business growth. How far should Kayla and Xavier go, to reach their respective goals without their marriage or self-destruction?
Director Jimmy Bangura tackles very thorny relationship questions, against the backdrop of the improving status of modern African women and the adjustments of expectations required from their men in modern societies. The re-negotiation of marital relationships that vacillate between traditional and modern expectations, with minimal collateral damage, is the story of this film.
