African film noir

By BILL CHAISSON
In the Stream
We found an African movie on line this past week and watched it. It was called “Taxi Driver,” and was filmed in Lagos, Nigeria. 

The film opens on a crowded minibus that is taking Adigun, a mechanic from a small village into the enormous city of Lagos. A preacher is declaiming a mostly nonsense and repetitive sermon in English and Adigun looks increasingly pained by the experience of listening to him. He gets off the bus with only a pillowcase of belonging dangling from his left hand.

In the wake of his father’s death has been summoned to the city by his father’s friend to claim his belongings. The sum total of his father’s belongings turns out to be a taxi and a single room for which he owes either two or four months rent, depending on the mood of the landlord.

Adigun is immediately plunged into a netherworld that he does not entirely understand. It is full of prostitutes and hitmen and he is perpetually broke and increasingly either frightened or angry.

The subtitles in this movie seem to provide you with more of an outline of the dialog than a verbatim translation, as the characters toggle between Yoruba and English.

There isn’t a lot of fancy technique in the camera work and there are certainly no sets used in this film. And yet the verité approach is compelling. The almost documentary feel of the narrative keeps you slightly off balance, which enhances the tension you feel. 

To the American viewer a certain amount of tension is automatic because this is an exotic culture and you’re not sure what is going to happen next for that reason.

And yet the film is largely an homage to a certain type of Hollywood action movie. There is an innocent everyman sucked into a criminal realm, a prostitute with a heart of gold, a two-faced friend, a mysterious dead father. All of these are moved to a Nigerian setting with fascinating results.