This is a review of Half of a Yellow Sun (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 April (updated 30 April)
This is a review of a special preview screening of Half of a Yellow Sun (2013), based upon the novel of that name by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and screened at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse), Cambridge, on 8 March, followed by a Q&A with screenwriter / director Biyi Bandele
Q&Awith Director of Half of a Yellow Sun @biyibandele yesterday at the @CamPicturehouse @HOAYSMovie pic.twitter.com/v4sxBgVU4P
— Mane Sanchez (@msanchezblesa) March 10, 2014
When one has heard Biyi Bandele talk about discussing making a film with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie of her novel, and even had him acceptingly answer one’s question about whether we had been right to feel uneasy sometimes that we were laughing (he wanted to see tragedy in comedy, and vice versa, and referred to ‘gallows’ humour’), there is the danger of losing objectivity, and of failing to say what one heard, saw and felt, because one does not wish to offend. However, the film is the thing being reviewed, and the worst that can happen to it – obviously not as a result of this review – is to be re-edited, censored, or even banned.
There are two neat shots in this film, first where, early on, we move downwards, through the floor / ceiling, and see Olanna (Thandie Newton) at the table, who had just been preening herself upstairs. The other is a similar magic-trick in a way, which is when Odenigbo’s mother is to Olanna’s right (we are facing her), then we move across to look just at her, and, when we move back, Olanna is now sitting next to Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), having another – but related – conversation.
These shots seem quite out of place in the rest of the film, where the next nearest thing is a busy tracking-shot, back and forth outside the home that is being evacuated (though they all act as if they are going on holiday, not least with what they think it necessary to take with them, rather than fleeing) – rather than intensifying a moment that is already tense (please excuse the wordplay !), the tracking is just somewhat irritating.
The aesthetic that gives rise to these devices, which seem out of character with the rest of the film, can therefore scarcely be intended to provide some sort of alienating perspective, since they act in isolation. (However, with the one last mentioned, one could probably seek to justify it, after the fact, by maintaining that it heightens our appreciation of how their bourgeois values have not yet been ground down to face the reality of conflict as against, say, preserving candlesticks.)
Likewise, Olanna and her supposed twin sister Kainene (Anika Noni Rose) really just present as spoilt bitches, not out of place on the set of late-1970s t.v. series Dallas. Though they are certainly not virgins, of course no one watching wants them [to have] to sleep with the minister who has come to dinner to win their father the lucrative contract that [Kainene and ?**] he wants, but that does not make their general attitude and behaviour endearing, any more than it does in the story of Cinderella***.
To some extent, though, that trans-generational revolt provides a sort of alienation – except that the film will also have us believe that they will discover what it is to be a mensch through the horrors and deprivations of the war in Biafra (1967–1970). (It has to be said that, in that, it appears little different from the novel****. It is also little different, say, from The Book Thief (2013), where we see similar kindnesses in the time of war, probably more so, but neither film approaches anywhere near the atmospheric and dramatic status of Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).)
According to what it seems Toby Miller (@tobytram) [of Cambridge 105’s ‘Bums on Seats’ radio-show] established in his interview with Biyi Bandele after the screening, the film is actually intended to show a melodrama, whereas, as intimated in the question to Bandele, it appeared that it was perhaps striving to be something else. In any case, if one compares Sun, say, with a dynastic film such as Buddenbrooks (2008) – though any difference is, obviously, largely rooted in the different nature of the original text – the only parent who has any real part is Odenigbo’s Mama (Onyeka Onwenu), and we have a chance to get to know and value her.
Therefore (although this may be a matter of digesting the elements of a novel and making a screenplay from it), we have no further sight of Kainene and Olanna’s father (there is telephone contact*****), and we are never again in Lagos. Tellingly, Bandele had told us that his view is that slavishly trying to capture every strand of story of a novel is best fitted to a t.v. series, not to a film, and that the latter medium best makes a screenplay based on a short story.
Yet what Bandele has nonetheless chosen to make into a film is, of course, a novel, and where he stated that he had had ‘to tone down’ Ejiofor’s character (known between the sisters as ‘The Revolutionary’, seemingly privately) so that he was not overlarge for the screen. When asked if he had relied on his own memories of the civil conflict, Bandele had to point out that he was only aged three when it ended (and, indeed, we can see that the novel’s author Adichie was not born until a decade after him), and we hear that what happened is not talked about now in Nigeria.
Clearly, there are good reasons why we should learn that ‘Biafra’ is more than a name from the 1960s, where it was, why, and why it no longer exists. Thus, in addition to Anika Noni Rose, and Thandie Newton (whom Bandele says he has known since the age of nineteen), let alone the now-celebrated Ejiofor, he also has Joseph Mawle (as Richard) in his cast, plus cinematographer John De Borman, to whom he referred for his work on The Full Monty (1977) (though arguably better known for Made in Dagenham (2010) or An Education (2009) – or even Quartet (2012). However, one cannot help feeling sorry for Ugwu (John Boyega), turned into (compared, one gathers, with the book) someone who is ordered around for much of the time, and only much valued when traumatized.
Sadly, that is too much a paradigm for how the film operates / fails to operate as a whole. It was a valiant effort for Newton, amongst others, to work on through typhoid to complete filming, and for Bandele to wrap with just enough time to let Ejiofor get to the States and straightaway start filming Slave. However, does the film do justice not so much to the novel, but to the history of Biafra and of the Biafran War, in giving proper insights into what was happening then, rather than relying on newsreel (even if that need not have been ineffective - the first clip set the scene wonderfully well) ?
Amanda Randall (@amandarandall5) writes more here about the adaptation...
End-notes
* At the party to which (or the one that we see) Kanine and Olanna escape from their father’s house, we hear the distinctive strains of Dizzy Gillespie’s composition A Night in Tunisia – it is a shame that it has not been contrived that we are unaware that they are miming (to a credited version of the tune).
** Kainene is going, as she says that she will be, to Port Harcourt to head her father’s business operation, not continuing her extensive education (unlike Olanna in her academic post). Maybe their father would not listen to Olanna and her about sexual favours for the minister, but the impression is that it had been assumed, never discussed, and that these women suddenly assert their own rights…
*** A certain literalism seems to go with Bandele's approach to film-making, such that we have an unnecessary caption to tell us that where we see Kainene at one point is the airport (it plainly is), and her entry to get married is cued by, of all things, 'The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba' (from Handel's oratorio Solomon).
**** * Contains spoilers * The film would have you believe that you have watched a true story, by putting up captions afterwards such as ‘Kainene is still missing’ – given that it is 2014, and that part of the film is set in 1970, this seems a strange assertion, because few people probably consider someone ‘missing’ who has not been seen for more than forty years.
***** Despite an apparent desire to attend to period accuracy for props (e.g. chunky handsets for telephones, with those shell-like cupped mouthpieces), when Olanna uses wine as the means (or catalyst ?) of seduction (the film – maybe, also, the book – plays with drunkenness as a licence for illicit sex (reminiscent of Lot’s daughters ?)), the type of corkscrew that she uses did not exist (according to Wikipedia, it was not invented for another twenty-five years - so certainly not the modern method that she employs, piercing the capsule and pulling the cork through it…).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
