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The wide, still, often unblinking stare of feature film newcomer Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah burns a hole right through “Lady,” galvanizing the camera and issuing the audience with a challenge to look away first. Few will dare. It’s a deliberately confrontational style of performance and portraiture, fixing all attention on a character that people would, and do, find easier to ignore in real life: a young, working-class black woman living by and for herself on the mean streets of Lagos. As the only female taxi driver working her corner of Nigeria’s heaving metropolis, Lady is accustomed to underestimation by a callous patriarchy, and staunchly resists the gender normatives implied by her name. Olive Nwosu‘s lively, humid debut feature zeroes in on a determined individualist in a city of over 17 million.
In many respects, the story told here is a familiar one. Still haunted by a traumatic childhood, Lady works long days and nights, dreaming of escape — specifically, to the Sierra Leone capital of Freetown, a name she takes very literally. As she stashes her savings in a hidey-hole in her insecure shanty dwelling, we practically count the minutes until the dream is stolen from her. In some ways, Nwosu’s script subverts expectations. In others, it traces a classic, bittersweet arc of growth and self-realization even when plans are thrown off course. If her filmmaking style is relatively straightforward, it’s a rich, raw sense of place that gives this Sundance entry — premiering in the world dramatic competition — vitality and danger.
The sprawl and all-hours noise of Lagos come through immediately in expansive, sun-sharpened establishing shots — sweeping over the city’s waterways, squatter settlements and concrete-linguine highways, forever congested with impatient vehicles. It’s in one of these jams that we first encounter Lady, behind the wheel of her trusty mini-SUV, its windshield emblazoned with the all-caps slogan “SING YOUR OWN SONG.” Once traffic starts moving, she holds it up a little longer to buy peanuts from one of the many jaywalking vendors weaving their way around the cars; in this ecosystem of strivers living by their wits, every transaction matters.
She is less sympathetic, however, to the community of gangsters and sex workers that keep the city humming after hours. When her estranged childhood friend Pinky (an excellent Amanda Oruh), now a sex worker herself, reappears in her life with a job offer, Lady is coldly unreceptive. But the job, ferrying Pinky and her fellow ladies of the night for their pimp Sugar (Tinuade Jemiseye), is ostensibly easy and well-paid: Finally, a ticket to Freetown feels within reach. In reuniting with Pinky, meanwhile, Lady is forced to confront chapters of her past she had previously closed without closure, and to accept a life less solitary than the one she has guardedly built for herself.
The film is most expressive and affecting when observing the slow-building rapport between Pinky and her nightly female fares — garrulous, primped-and-powdered women with whom our introverted, sexually ambiguous protagonist has little obvious kinship, though she comes to see herself as their protector in a realm ruled by exploitative men. Ensemble scenes of the women at rest, gossiping and needling each other, crackle with warmth and lived-in specificity both in writing and performance. Ujah’s tightly controlled portrayal loosens by fine, still-wary degrees, as if uncertainly trying on sisterhood for size. Nwosu’s script likewise avoids pat female-bonding sentiments, attentive to the experiences and worldviews that can still separate women in a man’s world.
Nwosu proves herself a keen-eyed observer in such scenes, as she does in sequences that ride the city’s teemingly chaotic, unpredictable street life, with Alana Mejia Gonzalez’s camera charging intrepidly through strobe-lit clubs and dust-kicking political protests alike. When it’s driven more by plot than atmosphere or community, however, “Lady” feels less confident. A late, high-stakes narrative swerve is hastily engineered and rather too easily abandoned, while flashbacks to Lady’s damaging childhood have a slightly tidy, script-workshopped air to them — as does the clunky insertion of present-day political context via regular radio reports by a radical DJ.
But these are minor first-film missteps in a character study that mostly thrives on rough edges and clashing textures — the hallmarks of a distinctive urban environment that has molded an equally spiky, unusual personality. As much as Lady yearns to distance herself from Lagos, she remains a daughter of its energy and friction, cutting her own path through its tumult.
English (US) ·