By Maja John Joshua
Two decades of friendship and growing up with some basic relationship principles, lifelong best friends Uche (Nse Ikpe-Etim) and Toyin (Dakore Akande) fall for the same seeming divorced man, this test their friendship and resolve for life and also loyalty to their decades of togetherness and oneness as they face what lays ahead
The movie begins with the two friends spanning two decades apart, 1999 and 2009, where one of them gives up getting together with a guy to stay with her friend Toyin as she claimed because there’s only one “US.”
The movie moves to the present in a wedding by the seaside all dressed in white while the wedding is ongoing Uche takes a lustful look at a married man “Sunday” (Oris Erhuero) far away by her right whose wife was later in the movie found to be in an unpleasant situation with each other.
“Sunday” hooked up with Uche and they had sex at the wedding venue.
The movie goes into full gear where we see a train to Ibadan, “The Sunday” begins his usual exploits of luring Toyin, though it seems like she secretly admires him.
‘Sunday Affair’ was produced by Mo Abudu and Directed by Walter “Waltbanger” Taylaur
Halfway through this film, one is tempted to look up the symptoms of stage 3 cervical cancer, because one of the main characters revealed that she has cervical cancer and prior to that information (and even after), we have never seen the realities of what it means to have stage 3 cervical cancer. There isn’t any real detail about the condition or the harrowing treatments involved– the character is able to have intercourse and even becomes pregnant, without awareness on the movie’s part about the complications involved with any of the above.
A Sunday Affair wants to tug at your heartstrings and make you emotionally invested in the struggles of the characters, but it is afraid to go into the nitty-gritty of the situation. This kind of approach prevents the film from having any significant impact, and by the time the credits roll, you’ll either be confused, or have forgotten most of what you’ve watched, or both.
At a point, one couldn’t care less about who ends up with Sunday. This is because the plot is more contrivance than organic with possession stemming from any motivated character decisions (and yes, we expect some level of hijinks with a romantic film, at least in the setup, but here, everything feels plastic). The performances don’t help either.
I’ve witnessed Nse Ikpe-Etim (Glamour Girls) chew scenery and spit it out effortlessly (her scenes with Sola Sobowale’s Eniola Salami in King of Boys: The Return of the King come to mind). I’ve also seen Dakore Akande (Isoken) balance very good dramatic and comedic work (Isoken being the foremost example) but in A Sunday Affair, their delivery feels tepid and uninspired, as if the director told them to search deep within themselves for the least interesting way to represent their characters and go for that.
The worst performance here by a mile, however, comes from Oris Erhuero (Road to Yesterday) who plays Sunday like the world’s most boring lady’s man (an oxymoron of sorts you’d think); his name is right there in the title of the film, but at no point does he show anything to hint at the complexity and depth of his character. Everything is at surface level. Everything is artificial.
