Love Is War

It’s always an experience watching Omoni Oboli films. They are almost a genre unto themselves. One in which no one else can quite fit.

Love Is War is the story of a happy couple who use their own hands to add ‘palava’ to their lives when they both decided to run for the position of governor of Ondo state. The wife – Mrs. Phillips (Omoni Oboli) – actually has political experience and is recommended for the position, but her opponents, in an effort to sabotage her, nominate her husband as well (Richard Mofe Damijo). He soon calls their bluff and what starts off as a controlled plan between two married people turns into full on war. Hence, “love is war”.

It’s easiest to start off with the best things about this movie and they are as follows: Omoni Oboli’s hair, Omoni Oboli’s outfits, the video quality and the very few and far between opportunities we get to see Femi Branch utter dialogues (please refer to our review of “Out of Luck” for the beginning of our love affair with Femi).

Now onto the other things. This film is written by Naz Onuzo and after seeing a few of his works, his writing style has started to take on an identifiable persona of its own – simplistic and uninspired. And one doesn’t need to reach too far for an example of this. For instance, one of the lines in the campaign speeches in this movie reads thus “My husband is a good man. He is good. But WDP is bad. It’s bad for my husband. Should we allow WDP to win? Nooo” do I need to say any more? And this level of reasoning pervades the entire film. There’s no attempt here to give the characters any type of weight or fabric, as most of the decisions and transformations made by these characters are decided on in the most banal of ways. If you want to get the husband to decide to run for governor, it just takes one off-handed comment from the daughter. If you want him to turn on his wife, you simply need one misplaced sentence at the dinner table. If you want to convince a person promised deputy governor to run as chief of staff, you just need one brief meeting with intense eye contact. At least by the end we elevated our standards of transformations to gun shots and blackmails, but you’ve probably never seen a more contrived sequence of events before.

This is a movie that is best enjoyed if you decide to leave your brain at home. Don’t think too much, don’t ask too many questions or the writing will leave you bamboozled and questioning your own sanity. The plot holes here abound so much that it’s best to think of it as a donut – no core, just body. There is ample opportunity here for the story to rise above the caricature that it can’t seem to help becoming and question many fundamental things, like gender roles in marriages, gender roles in marriages in an African society, Nigerian political norms and rules, the political nomination process and many others. Granted, there are a few moments here and there that shed light on the deficiencies of our political state, but they are all glazed over at best.

The actors must have had a swell time bringing this one to life because not much was required of anyone here – if your acting doesn’t deliver don’t worry the intense music will make up for it, if the story lacks an actual core don’t worry the pretty surface will make up for it, if the audience isn’t really sure what they’ve watched at the end of the 119 minute ordeal, don’t worry the star power will make up for it.