Released in late 2014, Ada Mbano in London (2014), directed by Theodore Anyanji, represents one of the latest contributions to the burgeoning genre of Nollywood films set abroad. However, despite the obvious overlap in the titles, Ada Mbano in London is not a sequel to the famous Osuofia in London (dir. Kingsley Ogoro, 2003). While the homage to Ogoro’s film is evident, this film takes the heroine, Adaure (also known as Ada Mbano), in her voyage from Lagos to London simply to “see more of the world”—to acquire a certain cosmopolitanism on the eve of her marriage to a worldly Nigerian senator. The character of Ada, as played by the Nollywood star Queen Nwokoye, is at the center of an expanding film series that started in 2012 with Anyaji’s Adaure, a nearly shot-by-shot Igbo-language remake of his largely English-language Levels Don Change (2012), which stars Uche Elendu in the familiar role of a self-serving village girl who moves to the big city under the pretext of enrolling in university. With the intense, raspy-voiced Nwokoye replacing the relatively restrained Elendu, Adaure shifts even closer to the template set in Funke Akindele Jénífà series about a “razz village girl” who goes to Lagos, gets a makeover, and finds herself in deep trouble. While this feminized village-to-city trajectory is certainly a hallmark of Nollywood movies, one that dates all the way back to the groundbreaking Glamour Girls (dir. Chika Onukwufor, 1994), Jénífà gave the trope a fresh spin, courtesy of its inspired antics, which revive and extend certain performance techniques familiar from the Yorùbá theatrical tradition. If Nwokoye’s performance style in Ada Mbano in London—the fifth film in the Adaure series—evokes that of Nkem Owoh (who played Osuofia), it does so through the mediating influence of the great Funke Akindele. However, where Jénífà’s use of Yorùbá is entirely expected in the Yorùbá-language film, Ada’s occasional bursts of Igbo are presented as eccentric interruptions in the largely English-language Ada Mbano in London, reflecting the investment of Anyanji’s film in certain notions of Anglophone sophistication.

Like Osuofia, Ada is comically malapropism-prone. However, unlike her equally Igbo-identified counterpart, she is not interested in preserving the sanctity of the Igbo language or of Igbo culture. Neither is the film, which pivots around Ada’s acceptance of the “progressive,” emphatically Anglophone connections between Lagos and London. Anyanji gets considerable comic mileage out of the character’s abuse of the English language while appearing to chide her for her lack of linguistic skills; he often frames Nwokoye in close-up so that the spectator may observe how her mouth mangles various words and phrases, and he offers copious cutaways to characters who, unbeknownst to Ada, laugh at her failures—a laughter in which the spectator is invited to share. In striking contrast, in the Jénífà series the title character is regularly reminded of the beauty of her Yorùbá heritage and she is even punished repeatedly for her alleged transgressions, which include an eagerness to dress like a Western “video ho” with clothes acquired from an English-speaking retailer. In the original Jénífà, rural Yorùbáland is the place to which the character must repair in order to restore her dignity. For Ada, however, the Igbo-identified village—the character’s own place of origin—is an embarrassment.

Struggling to shed her provincialism, Ada must first work on her “bush English.” “I am dying of suspension!” she screams at one point, before mischaracterizing the British Consulate as “the British course mate,” and the United Kingdom as “the United Country.” Set to marry Senator Afam (Tony Chukwu), Ada is well aware of her shortcomings and willing to surmount them through education (a trait that links her more to Jénífà than to Owoh’s arrogantly self-deceiving Osuofia, although Ada’s education is entirely informal and oriented away from questions of ethnicity). “You are going to become a senator’s wife, therefore you have to start working on your pronunciations!” Afam tells Ada over dinner, giving voice to what appears to be the film’s critical perspective—its prejudice against the qualities that link Ada to the village. Ada must cope with more than just her idiom, however. Afam’s daughter, Pearl (Tessy Oragwam), despises her father’s choice of lover. “Wait, Daddy, are you trying to tell me you want this inconsequential looking opportunist to be my stepmother?” Pearl asks, pointing at Ada, who defends herself with alarming, chest-pumping, utterly inarticulate abandon.

Anyanji soft-petals Pearl’s off-putting classism; his project is not to expose Pearl’s pretensions but to rid Ada of her “razzness”—to smooth the character’s decidedly rough edges by placing her in the acculturating environment of London, making her “worthy” of Afam’s hand in marriage. For his part, Afam endorses his daughter’s views by bankrolling Ada’s trip to London—a trip that the young woman views as her one chance to expunge the parochialism that she helplessly expresses, and that Afam’s friends and family members consider a liability. (They denigrate Ada as “an illiterate” and a “local girl” undeserving of Afam’s affections.) Before leaving for London, Ada goes back to the remote village of her birth in order to reconnect with her mother. Looking comically out of place in her modern floral-print blouse, bright-green pants, and high-heeled shoes, Ada steps gingerly through the mud as she approaches her mother’s abode, only to call the old woman (played by Geraldine Ejiogu) “an enemy of progress” after a misunderstanding involving the equally village-averse Afam. Already, Ada has internalized the prejudices of Afam and even of Pearl—a process that the film does not appear to critique.

When she lands in London, a preponderance of Dutch tilts and extreme low-angle shots, coupled with rapid montage, suggest Ada’s disorientation amid the skyscrapers of a European city. As in Osuofia in London, which also uses stylized low-angle shots to suggest a fish-out-of-water experience, a recurrent, nondiegetic song identifies Ada by her full name, and describes her journeys. Ada Mbano in London—again, like Ogoro’s film—features travelogue-style shots of actual tourists, which place Ada in the context of various touristic conventions. (Like the white couples who gape at Big Ben, Ada stares at the great clock in wonder.) Afam’s sister, Elvie (played by an unidentified performer), meets Ada at the airport, notices her fascination with London, and then tells her that she “ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Struck by Elvie’s colloquial expressions, the socially untutored Ada makes fun of the other woman to her face, saying that she “speaks through her nose . . . like a white person.” Elvie, for her part, comes to loathe Ada’s “bush style.” At one point, after Ada misinterprets the song “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” Elvie tells her to “stop acting like someone from the Stone Age!” The film invites the spectator to share Elvie’s antipathy—most obviously in a scene that excludes the title character and features Elvie and her friends shaking their heads and clucking their tongues over the oddities of the absent Ada.

Reflecting a corrective spirit that pervades the film, Elvie takes Ada to meet her white friend Gwendolyn (also played by an unidentified performer), who does her best to “enlighten” Ada, but who often just marvels at the African woman’s “ignorance.” Amusingly, however, a certain ignorance of acting technique undermines the film’s thesis, as the British cast member, whose performance style is stilted to say the least, cannot rise to the fluid level of the talented Queen Nwokoye, whose over-the-top performance is in the best Nollywood tradition. When Gwendolyn tells Ada to Google words and phrases that she doesn’t understand, or landmarks that she cannot find, Ada hears simply “goo-goo,” which she repeats to the consternation of her interlocutors. (In this respect, Ada is not unlike the Eniola Badmus character in Ubong Bassey Nya’s BlackBerry Babes trilogy, who says “Bookface” instead of “Facebook.”) Finally, Elvie and Gwendolyn forgive Ada’s foibles, as the three women become “proper tourists” during a nearly twenty-minute sequence set in The London Eye, a giant Ferris wheel on the South Bank of the Thames. Virtually undramatized and painfully protracted, this sequence invites us to watch the three women, along with a whole host of actual tourists, as they stare down at the sights of London.

While Ada, through her experience in The London Eye, comes to feel cosmopolitan, the film ends with her eschewing “white style,” saying, “I don’t think I would want to leave my senator for any white man!” Rejecting a masculinized whiteness for the sake of a Nigerian senator is not the same as forsaking the West in favor of Igbo culture, however, and Ada Mbano in London concludes with uncritical support for the title character’s repudiation of “the bush.” Perhaps the best that can be said for Anyanji’s film is that it provides a functional platform for Queen Nwokoye’s rapidly expanding stardom, stoking desire for the sort of film that won’t make her character the butt of every joke.