Glamour Girls

Ever had one of those weekends where you have detailed plans for all that you want to get done: all the places you want to go, people you want to see, etc. Then the weekend comes and somewhere between leaving work on Friday and getting back there on Monday morning you are not quite sure what happened. None of your goals were met, none of the activities happened, things just kept happening from moment to moment? That’s Glamour Girls in a nutshell. It’s a luxury wrapper filled with soul-crushing emptiness.

Glamour Girls is a reboot of the nollywood classic movie that even features a scene with some of the original cast members. In this reboot, Emmanuella (Sharon Ooja) loses her job in a strip club and decides she no longer wants to play the kobo game but wants to “chill with the big boys”. Enter Donna (Nse Ikpe-Etim). Donna runs a business as the middle man between the rich and powerful of the city and the ‘classy’ babes they spend their moneys on. After a lot of appeals, Emmanuella convinces Donna to let her into her world and immediately her life changes. Emmanuella turns into Emma and starts frolicking in the big leagues. She bags herself her own personal Maga, Shege (Femi Branch), and watches her life transform in no time.

As this is going on, we are introduced to the character of Jemma (Joselyn Dumas) who used to be like a sister to Donna until she broke the cardinal rule and fell in love with a customer. Now Jemma’s life is not as glamorous and she looks to Donna for financial help. Donna agrees to help her on the condition that Jemma comes back into the world of ‘glamour’. After being reeled in, Jemma finds herself in the center of a sticky situation with the accountant for all the big ‘bosses’ (Lynxxx). Donna comes in to help and in so doing entangles all the girls in something that could potentially lead to all of their deaths.

It’s so fascinating that something can be made so big and yet so vacuous. The film plays like it was intended to be a multi episode series but was suddenly cut down into a two hour film. Somewhere in between, it lost its plot, it lost its meaning and it lost its message. In the end, the audience gets a finished product that barely half nods to the original work but instead insults its memory. The plot-holes here are so abundant that its easier to think of the whole film as a vacuum. It’s simply a luxury photo shoot with lines.

Sharon Ooja as Emmanuella is so incredibly incapable. In her supposed standout scene where she attempts to convince Donna that she is a street girl who has been through it all and will now do anything to climb up the ladder, she barely succeeds in convincing the camera-man. There is a depth that is lacking about her performance that makes it continuously comes off as an instagram-mer filming a skit more than an actor engrossed in a character. She might not be the world’s worst actor but perchance she’s not ready to carry a whole film yet.

Nse Ikpe-Etim is left the huge load of being the only actual actor on the set in most scenes. And even though here is an actress who can actually deliver, in many scenes she’s relegated to pouting her lips, taking catwalks and tapping her ear. It really makes you question the objective and skill of the director. There’s a specific scene on a boat/yacht where they really positioned Nse with her midriff stretched out and required her to stay in that specific pose for the entirety of the scene despite what was happening around her. This singular scene highlights what’s important to this filmmaker – “abeg give us fine fine shot, whether e make sense or e no make sense”.

Somewhere in Glamour Girls there’s a spectacular story about the inner workings of the Nigerian upperclass laced with a story about the bonds of friendship. There’s a story of a desperate and unrelenting hustler laced with a story of the travails of the Nigerian society. All these stories are in there somewhere, all we needed was a skillful writer to bring it to the surface.

So watch glamour girls if you want to look at pretty things but don’t fool yourself that there is any story to be told here.