The most significant days from your childhood linger in memory with unusual luminosity, and for the young brothers Aki (Godwin Egbo) and Remi (Chibuike Marvelous Egbo), today is about to be one of those days. It starts out simply enough: a hot, lazy morning at their home in rural Nigeria. They eat cereal, bicker and horse around, amusing themselves while their mother goes to the village. It’s seems like it will be like any other day.
But then their father, Folarin (Sope Dirisu), says he needs to head back to Lagos to pick up his paycheck. He’s rarely home, since he works in the city and spends long stretches of time there, and they’re unhappy that he’s leaving again. On a whim, he decides that his sons will come with him on this trip. Delighted by the unexpected time with their father, they get ready for a day that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
“My Father’s Shadow” is not strictly based on the childhood of its writers, Akinola Davies Jr., for whom this is also his feature directorial debut, and his brother, Wale Davies. But they lost their father when they were young, and the film feels filtered through a fiercely personal layer of love and memory. Set against the backdrop of the contentious Nigerian presidential elections in 1993, and thus a country teetering on the brink of democratic crisis, it unspools like an odyssey for these two boys, who don’t quite understand what’s going on around them. All they know is that their father’s world is much bigger than their own, it often takes him away from them and they fervently wish it did not.
Those absences have created a kind of space between father and sons that manifests in equal parts admiration and resentment, a gap visible in their interactions. For his part, Folarin is rediscovering the boys as much as they are relearning who he is. In his extraordinary performance, Dirisu has a charismatic, mesmerizing presence, playing a man who feels tenderly toward his family but has tremendous sorrow and rage bubbling beneath the surface. He is a mystery to his children, and thus to us at first, but we can see there’s a lot to him, much more than his sons probably will ever know.
This kind of memory film has a double framing, of sorts: We’re watching from the children’s perspective, but through the lens of an adult’s memory. (In this way, it’s similar to films like “Aftersun” and “Janet Planet.”) So there’s a dual consciousness at work — we have to feel the naïveté of the child as well as the intuition of the adult, who looks back on those moments and understands, from the distance of age and experience, what they were really seeing.
To create this effect, Davies and his cinematographer, Jermaine Edwards, often subtly shift to the boys’ perspective, showing the action at the height of their eye line rather than that of the adults. As Folarin is having a conversation, we may be only half-hearing it, because the boys are distracted by something they see on the street. When a crowd begins shouting in a bar and chaos breaks out, we feel not the passion and fury of the adults but the panic of the boys caught down below in the crush of torsos, unable to see what is happening.
But we don’t spend the entire film looking from the boys’ point of view; sometimes we shift to Folarin’s, and grasp some of what has been going on in the parts of his life — both personal and political — that his family knows nothing about. A hardened stare between him and a group of soldiers can speak volumes. The glance a waitress gives him when he orders sodas for his sons means something more than mere acknowledgment of the request.
The pivotal scene in the film comes in the late afternoon, and involves a heart-to-heart talk between father and son on a beach. It’s the culmination of something that “My Father’s Shadow” does beautifully: continually unfold Folarin’s character in manners that defy expectations, the way it is startling to learn, as a child, that your parents are real people. The reasons this day will hover in Aki and Remi’s memories are manifold, but for Aki, at least, it’s the day in which he learned what he means to his father. The film grows impressionistic at this point, as if the memory sometimes becomes too intense to look at directly. “Daddy, if you say that you love us and God loves us, then does that mean that people who love us are always far away?” Aki asks his father. The look on Folarin’s face says the question has gone like a stab through his heart.
It’s that sharp contrast of beauty with an undercurrent of pain that makes “My Father’s Shadow” so bittersweet, and it’s why it cuts to the quick. “The memories that pain you when someone leaves are the same ones that will comfort you later,” Folarin tells Aki on the beach, as they watch Remi in the waves. No wonder this memory needed to become a movie.
Credit: New York Times
