by Akinwande Jordan
The genius of any romantic drama worth its salt lies in its ability to sell you dreams that can’t happen in real life, whilst flattening whatever cynicism you might have. It’s a formula to fuel delusions ornate with familiar themes.
We don’t mind that it’s the stuff of dreams or heterosexual histrionics or that cupid’s arrow doesn’t exactly exist in the way that it’s depicted in Love, Actually, Sleepless in Seattle, or if you are a so-called realistic purist, 500 Days of Summer. To write a romantic drama or any film, for that matter, you need a story or, at the very least, a defining event to push the skeletons of a story. Knowing that fundamental rule of storytelling, it’s a bit concerning that A Lagos Love Story refuses to follow it.
This new inkblot Netflix streamer stars the gorgeous faces of Mike Afolarin and Jemima Osunde as a romantic pair. Chinaza Onuzo sits in the director’s chair, and he’s no stranger to this ilk of film (The Perfect Arrangement (2022)).
Mike Afolarin plays a charismatic artiste by the name of King Kator, who is gaming the system by appealing to the mindless need of audiences, and Jemima Osunde is Promise Quest, the typical albeit steely event planner in Lagos, whose family has plunged into financial strife.
After bombing her first shot at impressing Fadekemi Rhodes (Linda Ejiofor), Promise stumbles into a second chance the way most Lagos miracles happen—by accident, and in heels. A brush with King Kator at some velvet-rope party gets her noticed by the real shot-caller, Achike Ezeoma (IK Osakioduwa). Suddenly, she’s back in the running. The catch? She has to babysit royalty. Four days of playing concierge to King Kator—four long, humiliating, soul-draining days that feel more like a prison stint served in stilettos. But it’s the only viable path. And Lagos never made room for the arrogant and the risk-averse.
On paper, this should work — every film works on paper because it is crafted in the abstract, but a Lagos Love Story, a film loosely based on an Ayra Starr song, is merely a jukebox for familiar tropes of romantic ilk. A film for someone dying to make Lagos less of an overcharged, gluttonous metropolitan eyesore with the divine euphoria of romance.
Lagos here, is New York. Some bizarro version of it— where the aspirational class outstretch their hands to the castles of the affluent. Understandably, there’s something beautiful about love in an economically cold city where sentiment is a scarce trait, but let’s face it, it’s a slippery slope into escapist malarkey and it eschews the substantive sincerity that’s required to do this effectively.
Let this much be said; Jemima Osunde is a good actress — she has a girl next-door physiognomy and a serious banker with an MBA eyes, Mike Afolarin is affably decent but the eyes recoil every time you witness overt displays of fleeting affection and the utterances of lines that make even the most dyed-in-wool new romantics roll their eyes into uncharted angles. But the end leaves you simultaneously hollow and, quite frankly, slightly annoyed at the fundamental concept of romance itself.
And so, once again in the immortal words of Aretha Franklin: “Beautiful gowns, beautiful gowns.”
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