The two halves of Eyimofe (This Is My Desire), Arie and Chuko Esiri’s diptych of Nigerian lives, are primarily linked by their protagonists’ desire to emigrate to Europe from Lagos. A palpable sense of desperation and frustration grips the characters, but in seeming contrast, the film is understated in its attunement to the challenges they face at work and with their families and the difficult steps they take to escape their stagnant existence.
The first story revolves around Mofe (Jude Akuwudike), an electrical engineer hoping to move to Spain. When he isn’t working long days in a dangerous factory full of malfunctioning equipment, he turns to side gigs to make more money, such as fixing electronics. Mofe’s life is rife with dysfunction, and it reaches a disastrous boiling point when a broken generator in his apartment results in the accidental death of his sister and her two children.
It’s around here that Eyimofe’s fixation on the transactional nature of virtually everything in this society becomes unmistakable. Already pushed to the brink of exhaustion, Mofe is forced to negotiate with healthcare officials charging him to take the bodies of his family members home, an undertaker ripping him off on burial fees, and a legal system that makes him jump through hoops to get money out of his deceased sister’s bank account. It’s all very tragic, but there’s nothing pitying in the way the filmmakers capture how that bureaucracy suffocates the human spirit and makes a man’s prospect of emigrating to Spain seem like a pipe dream.
In Eyimofe’s second half, we meet Rosa (Temi Ami-Williams), a hairdresser and bartender desperate to get to Italy with her pregnant teenage sister, Grace (Cynthia Ebijie), whom she’s raising by herself. Where Mofe is stoic and immutable, Rosa is downright chameleonic, changing her personality as often as her hairstyle depending on the situation at hand. And the filmmakers approach her exploits with patience and empathy, their camera subtly revealing the hopelessness that compels her even in the most seemingly relaxed of moments.
Like Mofe, Rosa also endures much humiliation, in her case at the hands of her sugar daddy landlord (Toyin Oshinaike) and a wealthy businesswoman (Chioma Omeruah) who offers to pay her and Grace’s way to Italy in exchange for the latter’s newborn child. But Rosa is more wily and feisty than Mofe, pushing back against her exploitation by leaning into ruthless displays of manipulation, which the filmmakers recognize as a seeming necessity created by the frighteningly limited options available to young, poor women in Lagos.
A glimmer of hope is offered by a white American expat, Peter (Jacob Alexander), who picks Rosa up when she’s tending bar and takes her around to parts of Lagos that are only accessible to the wealthy international businessmen working out of the city. He’s perhaps the better of Rosa’s two options in men, but her dire financial straits soon leave him believing the whispers of co-workers who callously suggest that all poor women in Lagos are interested in is money. It’s the film’s only nod to the enormous rift and tensions between the classes in Nigeria, with the glimpses of oceanside resorts and fancy restaurants serving as stark contrasts to the clutter and squalor of the poor neighborhood that Rosa and Mofe inhabit.
Otherwise, Eyimofe expresses the macroeconomic conditions of Lagos purely through the microdynamics of its characters and their exhaustive and exhausting efforts to escape poverty and carve out meaningful lives for themselves. All the while, the Esiri brothers’ approach is restrained and unsentimental, and while there are a few stretches that drag, particularly in the first half, their observational style, enhanced by both the naturalistic performances and reliance on lengthy shots of their characters engaged in mundane activities, exhibits an underlying tenderness that counterbalances the often cynical portrait of life in Lagos. For Mofe and Rosa, it may not be feasible to escape their conditions, but the filmmakers find meaning and purpose solely in their unquenchable desire to do so.
Image/Sound
The Criterion Collection’s 2K digital transfer retains the warmth and grainy softness of Arie and Chuko Esiri’s delicate 16mm images, while still presenting a great deal of image detail in everything from Lagos’s rundown buildings to people’s faces. The color grading tends toward the naturalistic, but it leaves room for vibrant splashes of color, especially noticeable in the characters’ clothing. Clarity and dynamic range on the 5.1 mix is well-balanced, with especially nice separation between dialogue and diegetic sounds.
Extras
A lengthy new conversation between directors Arie and Chuko Esiri and filmmaker Bette Gordon covers a lot of ground. The twin filmmakers open up about reconnecting with their ancestral home of Nigeria and how escaping one’s troubled place of origin became a major theme of their film. In an interview with Melissa O. Adeyemo, the producer passionately discusses her love of African film and the importance of representation, and also touches on how the film’s financing was secured entirely within Nigeria. The disc is rounded out with deleted scenes and three of the directors’ earlier short films. And a foldout booklet comes with an essay by writer and film producer Maryam Kazeem, who writes astutely about the transactional nature of Eyimofe’s characters’ attempts to leave their homeland.
Overall
Arie and Chuko Esiri’s feature debut is a poetic evocation of the struggles big and small faced by people escaping toward brighter tomorrows.
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