Sweet Face

***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS***

Sweet Face is a sweet little romance that traces the love story of an older couple – Nkem and Tobi – to their younger days.

The movie begins with an ailing old man, played by Zack Orji, laying on the couch while his dedicated and loving wife, played by Ngozi Nwosu, reads to him. In that brief little scene, so much excitement is created within the audience for what is to come and as the movie goes on they are not disappointed – at least not right away. Soon enough the “The Notebook” vibes of that scene gives way to a flashback to 1980 where we see how the couple originally met. We follow a determined young Tobi as he chases down the beautiful Nkem and convinces her to marry him. There’s an earnestness and beauty in the way the story is crafted, especially in this phase. A combination of the directing and the performances pull you into this world where you are living with the characters and loving right along with them.

Soon after our lovebirds get married, life starts to rear up its ugly head as they both struggle for many years through infertility issues. The way the director shows the passage of time here is worthy of praise. The same issues are brought up repeatedly but they never seem overstretched. Somehow, without explicitly saying that time has passed, the audience gets the sense of passing time without the element of boredom. Such that when a character finally declares that it has been 8 years since they have been married, you pause and take it in shock.

Eventually though, they take in. However, the excitement is short-lived as even this good news is plagued with sadness. The characters are conflicted about how to move forward and after one takes a decision, a break occurs in their relationship. For some reason, it’s at this moment that the movie begins to shatter. It’s not shattering because the “enduring love” that we’ve come to believe in this entire time is breaking in front of us. Instead it’s shattering because of what happens every scene afterward. After this moment, it’s as though someone in the writer’s room/editing room suddenly realized that there’s a limit to how long this film can go on and decides to start making haphazard and sudden cuts. So suddenly Tobi leaves home, suddenly Nkem sells the car, suddenly Tobi comes back home and suddenly current day Tobi dies. There’s a fight between younger Nkem and Tobi – which we are grateful to have at least been granted – but then suddenly they are back together again. And as Ngozi Nwosu’s character is sitting in the living room of the home she once shared with her husband and reading the letter he left her, we, the audience, come to realize that we are about to get let down very swiftly. That last scene attempts to tie together whatever loose ends were left, but it doesn’t tie together the loose end of disappointment.

Any other movie gets to end as suddenly as this one did, but not Sweet Face. This is because a majority of the appeal of this movie is built around the story, the strength of its build-up, and the omnipresent feeling of promise. It promises something but the end delivers nothing. However, whatever it was able to deliver was immensely helped by the performances. Demola Adedoyin and Adaora Udeh as the young Nkem and Tobi have such beautiful chemistry. In the first half of the movie, Demola’s character was stronger and definitely more impressive as he reeled out his romantic lines and did one loving thing after another for his sweetheart. However, Adaora takes the cake in the second half (and arguably for the entire movie) especially for that screaming scene she has after he leaves her. In the second half, Demola does well enough with his emotionally charged scenes but it was very clear that there was room for much more from him – room for much less restraint from him.

The production of this film isn’t perfect. With a movie set primarily in the 1980s, the room for anachronisms is tremendous, and even though the movie sticks to the era with many things like clothing, sets and props, it falls time and time again with the dialogues, the words and the idioms of the day – especially that Merryl Streep comment.

This might be an objective finding but the greatest downfall of this movie was the let down. Throughout the movie it creates the air of “something is coming… something is coming… something is coming” but at the end, nothing came. Despite this though, it is still worth the watch for how potent the emotions it evokes are.

 

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A post shared by congatv.com (@congatv.nollywood) on Feb 7, 2019 at 8:42am PST