In Zikoko life's Siraam, Uzoamaka Power finds comedy in the distance between what we know about love and what desire persuades us to believe.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young woman in possession of a romantic imagination must be in want of a man who will disappoint her. Austen had the advantage of writing fiction about women and men in the Regency era before the invention of the situationship, that modern arrangement in which two people may behave as though they are in love while reserving the right to explain, at any subsequent date, that nothing was ever actually happening. The lexicon may have changed but the pathology persists. We have red flags, attachment styles, emotional availability and enough newfangled vocabulary and neologisms to diagnose a romantic catastrophe before breakfast, yet still seem perfectly willing to walk into one by lunchtime.
Uzoamaka Power’s Siraam, starring Genoveva Umeh as the eponymous character, takes this ancient foolishness seriously enough to find it funny. Siraam knows that Zubie (Shawn Faqua) is detached, intermittently attentive and constitutionally unsuited to the commitment she wants. She knows this with the irritating clarity of someone who has already explained the problem to her friends. Then she goes on to do exactly what she has just argued against.
Herein lies the film’s comic sensibilities and the Shakespearean rub. Emotional knowledge and emotional behaviour do not necessarily attend the same school of rationale. We may understand a situation perfectly and remain incapable of behaving accordingly. Desire, meanwhile, has an epistemology of its own: a glance can be misinterpreted as a promise to defy thy father and forsake thy name, inconsistency can be misread as fear of intimacy primed to be assuaged by time, and persistence begins to look suspiciously like the fates have a hand in this.
Siraam is especially good on the peculiar indignity of the almost-relationship or to borrow the portmanteau du jour situationship. There is no ceremony for something that never had a name or a nominal quality, no universally accepted period of mourning, and certainly no satisfactory answer when a friend asks what, exactly, happened. Yet the grief can be entirely genuine while its object remains maddeningly difficult to quantify.
Power gives this romantic abstraction a body through Siraam’s pregnancy scare and STI test, moments in which fantasy unceremoniously encounters the less negotiable facts of human biology. The body keeps score when you keep…scoring. Her sexuality is treated with a welcome lack of moral ceremony despite certain sequences being set up like a scene from The secret life of an American teenager, much to anyone’s chagrin. Siraam can be autonomous, anxious, impulsive and foolish, sometimes within the same afternoon. The film lets these qualities coexist without converting her into an object of conservative didactism.
Its finest observations are often the smallest. Siraam talks into a fan, dries her underwear against it, idly rearranges sticky notes in a doctor’s office. These gestures scarcely advance the plot, yet they give the film its sense of lived time. Power understands that anxiety is often undramatic: a private alteration in one's psychology occurring alongside the mundane business of keeping oneself occupied. Finding somewhere to dry your underwear, waiting for the doctor to call your name. The unremarkable tasks of being. Genoveva Umeh plays Siraam beautifully, with a performance composed of glances, defensive jokes, small bodily adjustments and the occasional pause in which Siraam seems briefly to catch herself in the act of being Siraam. In a scene, she reckons with the visceral manifestation of heartbreak with a Buster Keaton-esque physical comedy rendition and a bargaining with God. An act relatable to those who have slings and arrows of romance’s anguish on a cold Sunday evening.
Eventually the film arrives at its larger idea, which is less about getting over a man than restoring him to scale. Zubie has become enormously parasitic in Siraam’s imagination while remaining rather ordinary in the world. A signalling to a newfound maturity grounded not in the extinction of desire, merely one that ignites the restoration of proportion, moderacy and a healthy semblance of self-reflection.Perhaps this is the film’s quietest wisdom: that once we have put an end to the Hamletian question of being or not being, and reckoned with the imperialism of desire and the mythmaking induced by loneliness, we might learn the difficult art of self-sufficiency, even when the self has such dubious taste in lovers.
BLACK FILM WIRE RATING : 3/5
