Filmmaker Daniel Oriahi crafts a spirited tale that refuses to trust its own welcome excesses. One of three Nigerian films playing at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, “The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives” immediately throws the audience into the central dilemma of its plotty narrative. In the first scene, post copulation, Baga Segi (Odunlade Adekola) demands that his fourth and youngest wife Bolanle (Omowunmi Dada) see someone about being infertile: It’s been a couple of years since their marriage and they remain childless.
From here on, filmmaker Daniel Oriahi uses voiceover and flashbacks to reveal how Bolanle arrived at this moment. This is a melodrama of malicious secrets and manipulative lies that may lead to divorce, desertion and even death. If only it committed to its heightened register instead of trying to deliver a moral, almost biblical, lesson.
The screenplay, adapted from Lola Shoneyin’s novel by Oriahi alongside Adze Ugah, Mo Abudu and Heidi Uys, has many themes on its mind — among them, suffocating patriarchy, gender-based societal hypocrisy, and women’s sexual pleasure (or lack thereof) in traditional Nigerian marriages. Bolanle joins a household of three wives and their many children. First there’s Iya Segi (Iyabo Ojo), the authority in the house, to whom everyone except the patriarch must bow; the other women must seek her approval for their wants and needs.
Second wife Iya Tope (Mercy Aigbe) is kinder and seems mostly concerned with the wellbeing of her daughters; the film and Aigbe’s performance present her as intellectually disabled, playing into the familiar “holy fool” trope. Meanwhile, third wife Iya Femi (Bimbo Ademoye) is the most cunning and ruthless in trying to defend her position within the household, playing up to Iya Segi’s schemes as her most willing conspirator. All three are immediately threatened when Baba Segi marries Bolanle, and together, they plot a series of incidents to diminish her position.
Bolanle rises above it all, taking the moral high road every time. As the film keeps reminding us, she’s the most educated of the wives — a university graduate — which undermines the others’ naturally cunning ways. Still, their outlandish schemes provide levity, pushing “The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives” into welcome comic territory.
Toward the end of the film, many walls of secrets come crashing down — some inexplicably so, through unprompted confessions. Those scenes play as if the screenwriters gave up on trying to resolve the twisty plot, instead just making their characters tell all, leaving the film’s denouement much less engrossing than its setup. Like the drama, the performances are heightened.
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