Music is something very pure to Titi (Tosin Adeyemi) in “Dear Ajayi,” arguing with her more cynical friend Kofi, who claims that any song now is the “fusion of other people’s ideas,” that “it’s not about where it started but where it goes.” She’s a singer of other people’s songs when she drops by open mic nights at the Afro Republik club in southwestern Nigeria, but makes a convincing case interpreting Angelique Kidjo and Nina Simone that the music is her own when injecting such soul into them. Still, it’s frustrating to think that catching a break to make an actual career out of it would seem to require the kind of compromise that has made her singing so resonant in the first place, having neither the money or really the desire to move to a bigger city and seemingly confirming her older sister Ade’s (Bimbo Akintola) criticism that she lacks ambition, though ironically when her sister thinks she’s irresponsible, it is clearly out of principle.
Titi is certainly right about one thing in Damilola Orimogunje’s lovely sophomore feature when it’s not about where it starts, but where it goes, though its premiere at the Venice Film Festival as the first ever Nigerian film to play the Giornate deli Autori certainly is noteworthy as well. It’s surprising that Titi emerges as a main character in the laid-back drama when it first introduces Ade, a nurse who has tired of taking care of everyone from her patients at work to the two children she has at home with her husband Michael (William Benson), in addition to her ailing mother who’s just recently moved in. It can seem as if Michael requires a great deal of care too as a charcoal artist whose paintings aren’t selling as well as they used to and while she has no problem being the breadwinner of the house, he does and on top of paying the bills, she has to tend to his wounded ego. It’s what contributes to her anger at Titi besides having to hear her sing into all hours of the night when she watches her sister seemingly free to do as she pleases while Ade doesn’t see any daylight between her work and time at home.
However, “Dear Ajayi” is only partially about family dysfunction with two artists under Ade’s roof, both of whom are frustrated in their chase for success as Michael’s work may adorn the walls of old friends who have shiny offices to place them in, yet now has fallen on a dry spell and Titi has to consider what she has to do beyond singing to gain a foothold in the industry. The answers are not pretty, but Orimogunje makes the murky moral and ethical decisions all of the characters in terms of how they treat one another and what they’re willing to do to be content actively fascinating, as a traumatic event leads Titi to become more shameless in her pursuit of a recording contract rather than mired in despair, hooking up with a sugar daddy named Alhaji (Antar Laniyan) and a potential financial lifeline for Michael comes at the expense of time spent with his family, which is all Ade really cares about. The fact that the one thing Ade and Titi would seem to share is a deep faith in God, whether it’s in the songs of praise the latter sings or the insistence on going to church for the former, also doesn’t go without question when it seems like their lives are never made any easier by their strong belief.
Cinematographer KC Obiajulu elegantly utilizes a wide frame to show the natural beauty of a place that’s charms have been lost on those grinding through it and the relaxed pace makes it feel luxurious to settle into in spite of characters full of anxieties. When the chickens come home to roost in the third act, the film can feel a little overstuffed as it criss-crosses between all three central characters who can appear to be leading double lives, but it lands somewhere just right in following a trio that may not end up where they hoped they’d be but show grace where they are, extended into the ether by Orimogunje.
“Dear Ajayi” will screen again as part of the Giornate Degli Autori section of the Venice Film Festival on September 12th at 9:30 pm at the Sala Cortino.