The Wedding Party is the state of the art in Nigerian film entertainment: a big, slickly professional, colorful rom-com with a social comedy heart. It shattered Nigerian box office records and streams on Netflix. A blockbuster by design, it comes from The Elfike Film Collective, a super-production outfit assembling four of the new corporate powers in the land: Koga Studios, Inkblot Productions, FilmOne (the production and distribution arm of the ambitious multiplex cinema chain FilmHouse), and EbonyLife, the satellite channel that brought us the 2015 hit Fifty, a glossy, sex-and-the-city feminist ode to the lives of successful Lagosian professional women. EbonyLife’s Mo Abudu (executive producer) is the guiding spirit, and she has the Midas touch. Kemi Adetiba, an accomplished director of music videos and advertisements, makes her debut as a feature film director. (Another of Adetiba’s current projects is King Women, a series of interviews with distinguished Nigerian women from various walks of life. These interviews achieve startling intimacy and depth. If Mo Abudu has been making good on her proclaimed ambition to be “the Nigerian Oprah” as a media personality and mogul, Adetiba has Oprah’s genius for evoking emotional revelation.)
The plot is conventional. Dunni (Adesua Etomi), daughter of a Yoruba oil magnate, is marrying Dozie (the musician Banky Wellington), son of an Igbo electronics magnate. They ride to the reception in a Rolls Royce. The mothers are locked in a status competition. The Yoruba parents (Alibaba Akporobome and Sola Sobowale) are warm and a bit buffoonish, but the husband is hiding business problems. (Rest assured: the film is spoiler-proof.) The Igbo couple is elegantly sophisticated and bitterly estranged: the husband (Richard Mofe-Damijo, decades into his acting career but handsome as ever) is a philanderer, and the wife (Fifty’s Iretiti Doyle) has withdrawn into cold arrogance. The bride has vowed to remain a virgin until her wedding night; the groom has signed on to this but is haunted by his past as a legendary womanizer. This past manifests itself as Rosie, the ex-girlfriend from hell, with her entourage of mean girls. The bride will run away, to be retrieved with earnest pleading and declarations. The best man is a drunken agent of chaos, and the groom’s younger brother—like the groom’s whole crew, he sports a hipster beard—needs to establish himself as an adult.
The movie begins and ends with the wedding reception’s events manager (Zainab Balogun), a control freak given to hysteria. The running joke is that Nigerian society refuses to be managed. She gets no respect, easily brushed aside by imperious matrons. The invitations have embedded chips as a security feature but one goes badly astray before the opening credits, and a sly provincial character quickly demonstrates that the reception’s security perimeter can be breached if one speaks Yoruba in a blue streak and moves deftly. The guests have a choice of two menus: fancy European dishes selected by the mother of the groom, or Yoruba food from the mother of the bride’s chosen caterer, a ferociously stern Yoruba woman who might have started on the street as a “Mama Put.” No one wants the European offerings, and when the Nigerian food runs out, the events manager will end up on her knees, abjectly pleading with the caterer in Yoruba, her British accent and her dignity abandoned. Incidental pleasures include the hilarious “blessing” by a reverend father (Emmanuel Edunjobi), who vehemently calls on the Almighty to strike down evil-wishers. Ayo Makun, Nigeria’s reigning stand-up comedian and comedy film star, plays the MC. The acting, always fine, runs the gamut from Mofe-Damijo’s suavity to the broad, Yoruba traveling theater–derived scene-stealing of Sola Sobowale as the mother of the bride. Expressing well-being and social solidarity through dress and dance is a core cultural value, and we’re invited to take pleasure in watching an array of Nigerians with unlimited resources and great personal charm dress up and make their moves. This film isn’t a musical, but its subject and high production values allow it to exploit something like that genre’s stylized aesthetic heightening as it turns essential African social arts into glorious cinematic spectacle.
In spite of its Hollywoodian plot structure, then, The Wedding Party is saturated with Nigerian culture(s) and with Nigerian society’s self-understandings. An unemployed university graduate gets to make a speech about how the rich block the prospects of people like himself, forcing them into lives of crime. This gesture toward Nigeria’s social problems isn’t to be taken seriously—the film otherwise revels unselfconsciously in the luxury on display. But there’s a framing sense of Nigerian society as a hot mess, bubbling with chaotic eruptions, waywardnesses, jealousies, pickpocketing, and drunken accidents. All this is contemplated genially, even savored, as a true marriage is made and another is remade: the erring father of the groom rises to his feet to toast the young couple and rededicate himself to matrimony before the dancing resumes. Sit down with some popcorn, and prepare to be entertained.
