Dika Ofoma’s A happy ending: Bright lights, big city, and the enterprise of exploitation.
- Akinwande Jordan
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
With Ruby Okezie and Ifeoma Obinwa in the lead, Dika Ofoma’s A Happy Ending explores the seductive promise of city life and the exploitation that can accompany the pursuit of a better future.
The city is no country for young women.
Be not fooled by the execrable allure of the metropolitan sheen. Be not fooled by the flailing promise of the proverbial greener pastures and the banal truisms of infinite possibilities. Be not fooled by the gospel of hard work. It is no el dorado. The city is ravenous. The city will fail you. This might seem to be a school of thought extracted from the annals of Los Angeles crime novels or the diary of a kafkaesque figure disenchanted with an industrialized world but it has always been the broad-gauged philosophy of early aughts Nollywood. Urban fatalism, rural purity, young men and women leaving for the old capital, the venturing into a private odyssey and the admonition to be vigilant lest the devils in suits lead them adrift.
Dika Ofoma’s A Happy Ending, made for the second Zikoko Life anthology, takes its cue from that grim philosophy often recounted in aphoristic manner in tandem with Zeb Ejiro’s Domitilla (1996), by returning to that particular Nollywoodian vista of the city as an economic elysium for young women. Tatiana (Ifeoma Obinwa) comes to the city through her friend Ginika (Ruby Okezie), who brings her to work as a masseuse for Madame Ngozi (Anne Njemanze, who also stars as the eponymous character in the aforementioned Zeb Ejiro picture). The spa has another business of the lecherous nature, the “happy ending”, and Tatiana soon finds herself inside its small, strange economy of money, sex and survival.
Ofoma’s treatment of Madame Ngozi is one of the film’s sharper decisions. She has the authority of the madam, the woman who controls the space and understands its business, yet she is written with a curious restraint. She does not wholly consume Tatiana’s agency. She lets her make choices. There is something nigh-tender and maternalistic in that restraint, although the circumstances remain exploitative. Tatiana needs the work and understands what the work entails; Madame Ngozi gives her enough room to decide how far she is willing to go. The film consequently allows Tatiana to remain a participant in her own life, even as the terms of that life are being set by forces she did not wrought .
Then enters the affable albeit ribald senator. Played by Nonso Odogwu, who is always avuncular and charming even if he's playing Iago. The senator is older, wealthy and politically powerful, and his attraction to Tatiana gradually becomes an attempt to possess the conditions of her life. He wants her exclusively. He can offer money, comfort and the fantasy of escape from the precariousness of Madam Ngozi’s spa . For a young woman trying to survive in the city, such an offer has an obvious seduction. The senator can make life easier, but such an ease is the product of a faustian bargain.
The disequilibrium of power between them becomes unmistakable when he proposes a threesome with Tatiana and Ginika. Tatiana hesitates. That hesitation is the salient call to action. It gives the film a moment in which her own desire enters the room and refuses to disappear beneath the senator’s. He is accustomed to having money settle questions before they become questions. Tatiana’s reluctance interrupts that venal arrangement. The relationship, which has carried the appearance of intimacy, begins to reveal the harder structure beneath it: a powerful man and a young woman negotiating terms that he possesses far greater power to determine.
Ofoma is interested in this ensuing instability of agency. Tatiana has choices, though the choices available to her are shaped by the fact that she is in survivable penury and is trying to build a life in a city that is indifferent to her difficulties. Madame Ngozi affords her a certain degree of leeway within the spa. The senator’s arrival changes the terms of that freedom. His wealth allows him to offer Tatiana more, while his expectations ask more from her in return.
The film’s real subject, then, is the difficulty of making it as a young woman in the big city and its bright lights. Tatiana is trying to work, maintain her friendships, find a semblance of security and imagine a future beyond the immediate demands of survival. She circumnavigates a world in which men at the helm of power can transform desire into opportunity and opportunity into unreserved obligation. Her body becomes entangled in these negotiations, and she has to decide, repeatedly, what belongs to her and what she is prepared to surrender.
By invoking the same preoccupations of Zeb Ejiro. Ofoma is returning to an old Nollywood fable about women and the city, about the seductions that complement the promise of a better life and the bargains that promise demands. A Happy Ending gives that story another generation of contemporary anxieties. Tatiana wants the ordinary things people want when they arrive in a city. The film asks what happens when the people capable of helping you achieve those things also possess the power to define the terms of your survival. What happens when they are masters of your fate and captains of your soul?
Ofoma, despite his deferential homage to the old guard, forges a new didacticism. It is all too commonplace to witness female characters who have been subjected to being the fodder for judeo-christian moralities and cultural pieties. The nollywood categorical imperative would bestow Tatiana with a comeuppance and present her as a cautionary tale to the would-be nymphs of the pavements who are simply victims of a deteriorating system. But he sticks to the protean verisimilitude of storytelling. He does nothing to mollify polite society and its conservative values. He chooses the quiet boulevard of redemption. We all must fall short of some god’s glory, he says with his film,but we all are capable of finding our new genesis amongst the family of the blemished.
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