La Femme Anjola – A young stock broker’s life spirals out of control after he falls in love with a femme fatale who is married to a wealthy gangster.
A psychological thriller, film noir at it’s finest, neo-noir crime thriller, edgy, sultry, mysterious, a true cinematic gem…..yen yen yen, so many fine words were used to qualify this movie when it was released and i actually believed. But as I was just watching it recently, I kept on thinking in my mind that people really need to fear God and stop the lies and exaggerations already.
What did I think?
Good storyline. It started well, I was intrigued by the style, I liked the setting and I liked Dejare’s narration, but as the movie progressed i got tired and couldn’t wait for it end.
Acting worked but casting did not. Rita Dominic is a fantastic actress, Nonso Bassey is a good actor so they both did really well. However, I did not think Rita was the best person for that role. Rita Dominic is a sexy woman in her own right but in this movie, the “femme fatale persona was not fataling at all”. The chemistry between them was not great, their interactions were not intense enough to elicit such devotion from him such that he agreed to kill someone for her.
Don’t even let me talk about her singing in this movie, I hated every scene where she had to sing because it was sooo obvious that she was not the one singing. Don’t get me wrong, of course we know Rita is not a singer, so it made sense that someone else was doing the actual singing and she was just lip syncing but still, they should have used someone with a similar voice texture/timbre and tone as Rita’s normal speaking voice. The person singing sounded completely different, it was like watching 2 people in 1 body. Even the lip syncing was poorly done. The movement of her lips were always off by at least 2 or 3 beats, the live stage performances were awkward, she was trying so hard to give that sultry vibe but it just was not working.
Anjola could not even pronounce her own name convincingly. Her name was Anjola Titilayo Bakare but all through the movie she sounded like Chinenye. If we want to depict a Yoruba character, why not cast a Yoruba actress?
Back to the story itself,was it thrilling? No. Can it be classified as a psychological thriller? Noo.
Why?
Thrillers are suspense-filled with edge-of-your-seat narratives and psychological thrillers on the other hand are peculiar in style because they feature characters driven by obsession or violence, with an emphasis on internal tension and conflict. Within every psychological thriller, the core of it is defined by the inner workings of a disturbed mind thus the reason they call it “psychological”
There is nothing thrilling about watching a naive man do what only a naive man would do. Even his attempt at revenge was weak. Dejare was not the villain or hero in this story, he was just a simp. They did not give us a character we could like, even when he killed Anjola, I could not cheer for him, when he walked away from a burning car like James Bond, i could not cheer for him, I was just looking at him with this casual indifference because he was just not “that character “ and the final scene with the speech?Cringe!!!
No highlights, no ghen ghen moments. The scenes that should have been high points turned out really flat and I could not understand why.
The attempt to add a twist to the story was not lost on me but still i did not think the twist worked. Let me explain- Dejare thought he was helping Anjola kill her husband Odera but the twist is that the person that was actually killed was one of Anjola’s boyfriends- Oscar. This is my question, as soon as the police got to the murder scene, as soon as they saw the dead body, they would have seen immediately that the dead person was not Odera (Odera was a popular and wealthy gangster and car dealer) that should have affected the movie narrative, so I don’t understand how the police continued the investigation without highlighting the fact that the dead body found belonged to someone else. It did not make sense to me.
I was looking forward to an exciting police investigation but unfortunately that did not happen. The trip to South Africa was the final attempt to spice things up for this movie but it didn’t help because who leaves 5million dollars in an open box, in a strange house and strange country for hours without properly locking the doors???? They even put a gun on-top of the money, almost like they carefully and intentionally prepared the table for Dejare, it was too easy, too circumstantial, too unbelievable.
I must mention that the car accident was nicely executed. My only issue is that he walked away with only a slight limp, he did not break his arm in the accident because we saw his arms and they looked fine so i did not understand the reason why he had that huge and ugly cast on his arm and leg 3months after. For dramatic effect I guess.🤷🏽♀️
Overall, La Femme Anjola was not bad but it does not deserve all the accolades it has enjoyed and I just want to say let it stop already.
Rating: 6.5/10
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