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Jack’enneth Opukeme’s Aba Blues presents itself as a romantic drama about a woman caught between the man she married and the man she once loved.
Indeed it’s a complicated story about shame, memory, social expectations, class stratification, female vulnerability and the difficult business of choosing what kind of life one wants to live. Set in 1980s Aba, the then “happening” town in the east of the country, the film uses a temporal setting not merely as decoration but as a framework for examining values that continue to resonate beyond its historical moment.
Aba Blues centres on Amara, a newly married woman, whose apparently settled life is disrupted when Dirim, her former lover, returns to town. Her husband, Uzor, represents the life she has built, while Dirim represents the unfinished business of the life she once imagined. The resulting triangle is not particularly new in itself, but the threads begin to tie into knots as life refuses to make Amara’s decision entirely simple. She is not merely choosing between a “good man” and a “bad man”; she is confronting the emotional residue of a relationship that ended without giving her the closure she needed.
Recent criticisms of the film have identified this tension between the life Amara has built and the life she might once have imagined for herself, but this is the standing point of the colorification motif of the movie; should Amara feel the blues or courageously and unapologetically charge on the greens with Uzor?
One of the more comely preoccupations that the film explores is its focus on female stigmatization in the shackles of societal brutality. Amara brings to marriage a past that her family and society taught her to consider a blemish. Even Amara’s strict mother treats her with suspicion; she’s that problematic child whose condition is beyond the physical. The opening wedding is then more than a display of familial strife – it is a social mechanism that has been inculcating Amara’s sense of a damaged self. This is where Aba Blues’ social commentary is at its strongest. Amara is impacted by Dirim’s absence after becoming pregnant, but Dirim cannot suffer the same fate. His background places him on a pedestal as he is sheltered from the consequences of his sin, and she is the one who is made a scapegoat. The imbalance reveals a pattern that is often seen in patriarchal societies: A woman’s error can become her identity, a man’s involvement can be ingrained in his future. The movie does not portray Amara as a saint, but does question whether society has meted out a just punishment for Amara’s error.
The return of Dirim, therefore, is no longer a romantic entanglement. He tries to heal the wounds of a heart that never healed. His response and explanation in the aftermath of his apology is presented genuine even though there are questions as to why Amara may be susceptible to him. However, his actions slowly reveal an unhelpful notion of his own superiority. He treats Amara as not only his love but one who should return to him; he has made up his mind to get her back at all cost. That’s where the difference lies. What Dirim has to offer is not romance, but a pompous feeding on Amara’s insecurities. He makes her wonder if Uzor actually loves her or simply took her because she got “undesirable”. In the process, he turns the very insult he believes he has suffered into one he inflicts.
Meanwhile, Uzor is purposefully cast as the quieter character. He is not blessed with wealth or great influence in society; he has seemingly little to offer compared to the wealth and power Dirim brings to the table. But the movie slowly flips the script on that. Uzor might not be a well-to-do socially, but he is extra generous emotionally. His love is not based on Amara’s innocence, perfection or social reputation. It is based on his acceptance of the woman he has chosen to marry.
One of the most effective scenes and perhaps aesthetically pleasing is the romantic dinner. Frivolous yet thematically fitting, with the American-style ballroom arrangement. Aba Blues is in the zone of identity and influence, of Nigerian culture and foreign aesthetics, and the director goes to some length to choreograph that combination. Amara’s preference for traditional Igbo highlife over the imported ballroom space provides cultural richness and insight into the couple’s relationship. The dinner eventually becomes the heart of the movie because Uzor does not attempt to rival Dirim with money or social status. Rather he addresses Amara’s wounded sense of self. The film’s most significant statement is that his love is not a pity emotion; it is largely about security, acceptance and genuiness.
The fight that ensues reveals Dirim’s greatest weakness. He is impatient when he comes to the house and asks Amara to hurry up to pack strips, which takes away much of the fascination of his character. The man who said he returned because he couldn’t lose Amara seems less like a repentant lover and more like one who feels entitled to Amara’s love and reciprocality. It then punctures one with one great question: was it truly love he had for Amara or the feel of pride of being able to ride on her past vulnerability to his very own advantage?
Amara’s choosing Uzor’s significantly punctuates the major thematic tendency in the movie; it goes beyond paralleling the contours of the love triangle. It’s an act of self-definition and discovery. She tells Dirim unapologetically that she loves her husband and she loves their small “hole”, which symbolically represents their space. She renounces the social order that has given privilege to riches, reputation and has helped to further make evident the society chasm, contributing to the overbearing suffocating patriarchal tenets. But Uzor is different. Yet her choosing is not just “Uzor over Dirim.” It’s acceptance rather than humiliation, a future that does not haunt back to the past.
There are however some purging areas of concern in the movie. First, the title somewhat implies that Aba will be a major part of the film’s story. Some critics have stated that the city is not always given a sufficient visual and/or narrative presence to warrant that promise. The story seems to be set in a generic city, rather than the commercial and cultural city of Aba. That needed colorification to give the movie its most authentic verisimilitude seems to be missing. Again, the performances sometimes overlap due to overly dragged dialogues and laxed action phases even though the individual brilliance of the character and artistic dexterity end up saving the day. But the most troubling of these loopholes is that sometimes the central romantic struggle is not as convincing as it should be in the screenplay. Amara and Dirim’s renewed attraction is not completely convincing. To go by the images, Amara’s finding herself engrossed in Dirim upon his return despite the magnitude of stigma and hurt she has faced is questionable. It takes the very last moments for her to make up her mind. And the audience may have to swell in the nausea of a story that makes a woman too vulnerable to the point of constraining her logics to a past with a man that could not save her from shame when it mattered most. Therefore, it could be summarised that we see solid concepts such as love and trauma but with dwindled developments that sacrifice believability on the threshold of vulnerability and emotional purgation.
Nevertheless, Aba Blues remains compelling precisely because it understands that romantic choices are rarely as simple as they appear from the outside. Its most valuable contribution is its refusal to make Amara merely a victim or an adulterous villain. She is a flawed woman wrestling with memory, insecurity and desire yet attempting to determine whether the life she has built is genuinely hers. It greatly deserves all the accolades it gets for being less interested in asking which man deserves Amara than in asking whether Amara can learn to believe that she deserves love at all. The final movement to a larger space metaphorically reinforces that even a small hole can get bigger with time; and a new chapter suggests that happiness does not necessarily lie in recovering the past but in how resilient one can be in curating a better future.
