Retro Nolly: ‘Alakada’ Concentrates on Effects of a Fake Lifestyle

in this week's retro nolly, Seyi Lasisi revisits Alakada, Toyin Abraham most successful and popular franchise!

Retro Nolly is a weekly series of retrospective reviews of classic Nollywood films by Seyi Lasisi. We will be looking at these films with modern eyes, dissecting what made them unique and how they speak to today’s filmmaking, culture and society.

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From the first scene of Muyideen S. Ayinde’s Alakada (2009), we get familiar with Yetunde's (Toyin Abraham) story and traits. She is an ambitious lady from a home of modest means who has made a lifelong commitment to faking it till she makes it. While others work hard on their personalities and education to create an enviable career pathway, Yetunde chooses an unconventional route: calling herself wealthy when she isn't.

Alakada details Yetunde’s journey through university, where she is intent on impressing other students and claiming to be someone she isn’t. She disposes of her accented Yoruba for a phoney American accent. In place of fufu, which is her favourite food, she claims to prefer cereals. When asked about her parents, a petty trader and a security officer, Yetunde quickly dresses them in new professional garments.

Although her parents share a modest one-bedroom apartment with her and her siblings, Dada (Ayanfe Adekunle) and Lara (Arike Adebayo), Yetunde passionately tells her newly-found friends of their imaginary exclusive trips around the globe. The three friends, Dolapo (Doris S. Ademinokan), Arike (Faithia Balogun), and Dupe (Bisi Komolafe), accommodate her excesses even though they are aware of her illusory kinship with wealth. When Yetunde meets Tunji (Funsho Adeolu), who also shockingly goes by Ajani, she meets her match. Yetunde and Tunji, through false means—claiming identities not theirs and lying about their backgrounds—associate themselves with wealth.

Scripted by Abraham, the film not only details Yetunde's lifelong stint as a struggling lady trying to meet societal standards but also shows her loneliness and destitute countenance when she decides that living a phoney lifestyle isn't the best. The three-part film dedicates numerous scenes to reiterate Yetunde’s fake lifestyle. Despite each part of the film having lengthy screen time and exaggerated scenes, an understated aspect of Yetunde’s story is her parents and siblings’ unfair and sole reliance on her, a university student, for their upkeep. Burdened with providing for her complacent parents and siblings, one can interpret Yetunde’s ambition and fake life as a justified battle against generational poverty. However, what smudges her ambition and makes it unpleasant is how, in adorning herself with this false identity, she actively pushes genuine help and people away.

Nursing a dislike for one's parents because of their supposed lack of ambition and zest for a good life is universal. Watching wealthy children live a fairly comfortable and luxurious lifestyle has a way of encouraging children from low-income backgrounds to dismiss their hardworking parents as complacent. So, Yetunde’s rage and dissociation from her parents and background is fairly understandable. When she dismisses Dada and denounces her parents, not only is she ashamed of her background, but she is also making her claim to wealth. Brushing off people from her impoverished background, embracing more aesthetically pleasing clothing and sensibilities, and reeling off names of fanciful restaurants and countries are ways of making a claim towards wealth.

However, what Abraham, writer and lead actress, and Ayinde, the director, perhaps didn’t realise and explore is that Yetunde’s conflict is within. The fake life is a reflection of that internal but generational and universal dread ambitious youth from impoverished societies have to battle. When demanded, Abraham's performance doesn't convey Yetunde's vulnerability and internal conflict. The directing and performance of her soliloquies (solemn scenes when she regrets some of her phoniness) show filmmakers not adept with the subject matter they are handling. The film is solely interested in threading scene upon scene that comically reiterate and condemn Yetunde’s imaginary lifestyle.

Having recently seen and reviewed Funke Akindele’s Jenifa, which like Alakada has morphed into a successful franchise, it’s almost impossible not to recognise the possible relationship both films share, even though they treat their similar subject matters differently. Both Jenifa and Yetunde are eager to belong to the top echelon in their universities and societies, but while Jenifa doesn't denounce her background, Yetunde enthusiastically dismisses her roots if it ensures her reverence and wealth.

Although a chore to watch, the three-part Alakada has its memorable moments. When Yetunde recounts her wrong deeds, not only does the film lend her story emotional credence, but it also heightens the audience’s sympathy: you wish she'd shed herself of this false and exaggerated image. But, not wanting to appear needy and poor, we instinctively know she will continually keep up with the fictitious identity.