Tainted Canvas

Tainted Canvas is an ambitious story of a young Rayo (Segilola Ogidan) with a painful past of sexual abuse. Her abuse was enabled and at-times orchestrated by her own mother, Rose (Kehinde Bankole). She grows up with the scars of this abuse and when her mother turns gravely ill from cancer, she battles with the decision of whether or not to come home.

‘Ambitious’ truly is the word for Tainted Canvas. As it brazenly marches onto your screen with the force of all the social messages it wishes to tackle in its 90 minutes runtime. The problem is that this same ambition is the source of its undoing as it ends up taking on a lot more than it can handle. The film starts off as the story of Rayo. We see her arrive at the Nigerian airport and drive into her childhood home in the present day. Then there are a series of flashbacks that we are accosted with. The flashbacks are from varying times in Rayo’s past. From her childhood where she is seen eating sand in the school playground to her recent past in London where she tries to prevent herself from unraveling with the help of her close friend, Eze. The explanations always come after the fact as the viewer sees scene on scene without context in the beginning while waiting for the answers at the end. The problem with this sort of storytelling is that it either works brilliantly or ends up being an absolute mess and there’s hardly ever any in between. Unfortunately, Tainted Canvas never quite makes it to brilliance.

‘Ambitious’ truly is the word for Tainted Canvas.

It looses itself in the second-half/final third where Aunty Bisi (Tina Mba) tries to explain away Rose’s actions towards Rayo as a child as being due to her depression. She mentions how Rose’s depression was brought on by Rose’s father’s sudden death and Rose’s mother’s internal blame towards her. She suggests that the depression was worsened during Rose’s post-partum period with Rayo, and that this deep-seethed depression led Rose to do inexplicable things. Things that clearly varied widely from cheating on her child’s father to turning into her young daughter’s pimp. Now, no one is denying that depression is an awful terrible thing. However, after spending nearly an hour digging into the emotional trenches of Rayo’s trauma, simply trying to explain it away based on a depression story (that’s told in under five minutes with one flashback scene seems like a weak excuse). It’s tantamount to burning a baby alive because the temperature was cold outside.

In its bid to do more than it can handle by telling a story on the impact of depression while still telling a child abuse story, Tainted Canvas also manages to leave behind a number of plot holes. One of the most glaring of which is the question of what exactly motivated Rayo to take the flight back to Nigeria especially since she was initially reluctant to even broach the topic. Yet, somehow once she reaches Nigeria she turns into the model child of an abusive mother, sharing meals and memories with her aunt of a mother who ruined her life. The difference between London Rayo and Lagos Rayo even extends to her attitudes towards her manfriend, Toks. It is so night and day that it could not simply have been left to ‘audience’s inference’. It required an explanation.

The ambition of this movie is not all for naught though. There are the clearly effort-filled gestures such as having Rayo where yellow (a color that signifies illness and betrayal) in all the scenes where she is still hurting. And then having her change to a brighter pink at the end of it all. There was also the profoundness of the scene where Rayo returns to London and finds the old painting where she wished death on her mother but instead of getting a new canvas and starting over, she simply paints a masterpiece over the old work. Almost as though to say that beauty can still come from a Tainted Canvas.

The movie is supported by the most capable actors all around from Kehinde Bankole to Tina Mba. It was a delight watching these two in the hospital scene where they were effortlessly communicating with their eyes in a way that only seasoned actors can. Segilola Ogidan brings the required weight to her character of Rayo and is only handicapped by her own writing that fails to fill in plot holes that would have otherwise served to elevate her character and the story as a whole. Efa Iwara as pastor Layo is a delight to watch in every scene he is present in. And Nonso Bassey in a negative role here was quite a wonder.