Mother of George

Just saw Mother of George at Sundance. Movie tells a good story, spiced with ethnical flavor, colorful dresses and way too many close ups. The actors are very good, especially Yaya Alafia. She conveys the naivety of the character and her tortuous decisions. I think that the storytelling needed some faster pace. Many side tales shown in excruciating detail detract from the main thrust. The cinematographer has overdone the close ups and fade aways out of focus. And what is it with starting scenes focusing away from the action (a foot here, a finger there) and letting the audience guess what is going on from noise alone? The best scene, when Ayodele learns the truth about his son, is one time when fading of view and sound are truly effective. Many of the other seem contrived.

The film explores the layers of what it means to start a new family which remains a part of a larger community matrix. How much independence is necessary for the nuclear unit? To what extent do other relatives play within matters internal to the marriage. Moreover there is the center of the kernel, which is how does one remember to love oneself while being powerfully in love. The film provides great food for thought at a multitude of levels.

Mother of George begins with a traditional African wedding ceremony which takes place in New York City. The bride and groom are toasted with wishes for a baby boy in the near future which will be named George, in accordance with the groom's mother's wishes. After a prolonged period, the hopeful mother to be does not conceive and she attempts various methods to become pregnant. After more time passes, she visits a fertility specialist, but her husband refuses to be checked out by American doctors. Her mother in law tells her that she should allow her husband a mistress in order to have a child. This idea does not go well, nor the next one of having his brother try to father a baby with her. The movie moves slowly, and while the acting is solid throughout, and the clothing beautiful, I was bored by the time it finished.

Many men will do anything to avoid going to the doctor. This film may impel some of them to schedule an appointment, lol! Nigerian immigrants to New York struggle to apply traditional beliefs to a new lifestyle. Some are better at this than others. They discover their hearts to be entwined and hopelessly confused with what they imagined modern and traditional ways to be. Adenike tries to find the path to love with her seemingly traditional husband (or is it really his mother driving him?) Characters and circumstances flit around them like phantoms, good and bad, pulling them in different directions. A mother-in-law presses relentlessly for a grandson, friends encourage Adenike to be more independent even as her husband seeks the opposite, and Adenike's heart tells her many things she cannot long resist, among other burdens. Those at Adenike's wedding who promise that her life will be "sweet as a pineapple" are not there, of course, when life gets tough. Little lovely details, absent in other films, enliven your senses; the bright colors, an open window with street noises drifting through, silence seamlessly switching to music and then gentle voices in a room, contrasting shades of light, the sound of skin on skin, dazzling patterns and shades in clothing, or the outline of an exquisite face. Present here is the beautiful cinematography and sound control characteristic of Kar Wai Wong. The film is worth watching just for this alone.

Rhythm is often defined by locales - while mountain people seem to be rather slow by nature, those born close to sea shores appear to be faster in their movements. So I wouldn't call this film "slow", but idiosyncratically paced, admitting that I might be wrong: maybe Nigerians are faster than what I believe, judging from this film. Then it would be a decision taken by director Andrew Dosunmu, making dialogs and reactions calm to the extreme. I could take this, but what really distanced me was composition within the frame: too often actions are seen in close-ups, even in moments when large crowds are gathered. Maybe we have been conditioned so much by traditional cinema that we expect to see a reaction from a listener when told something that might shock him or her... as the moment when the pregnant Adenike confronts her brother-in-law in his apartment. But once this is accepted and dealt with, one can enjoy this strong drama of choices, tradition and deeply-rooted beliefs, beyond any moral judgment of what is right or wrong. In spite of the endless list of producers and executive producers who capitalize on the work of the creative team, the most remarkable features in "Mother of George" are (besides the performances by Danai Gurira and Yaya DaCosta, as Nike and Sade, the two young women subjected to matriarchy rule and dumb males) the cinematography by Bradford Young and Mobolaji Dawodu's beautiful traditional costumes. The brightness and colors brought by the use of natural and artificial light and the garments, create an atmosphere of hopefulness and joy in the midst of so much sadness and obsession with parenthood. See it.