Evelyn and Roselyn, the two sisters at the center of Biodun Stephen’s heartrending limited series, are markedly different people dealt a harsh hand by life, the older sister more than the younger. Growing up without a mother figure, but with a good, if stern, father, the girls fall into what seems a preordained order: the more big sister Evelyn steps in to shield little sister Roselyn from reality, the more little sister looks up to big sister, and the harder life turns for big sister, the softer it swings for little sister — at home, at school, in life, in love. The blows come harder when Roselyn (Uche Montana) marries Evelyn’s (Munachi Abii) childhood best friend Lanre (Taye Arimoro), and, in the face of childlessness, the sisters learn just how much their imbalanced bond and dynamic is their undoing.
The script, by Stephen and Ambimbola Akin, sets this up by rotating narrative duties, the sisters commenting on their old life from their new standpoints. It is a tensioned point-of-view that maintains an emotional scaffold for an already tightly written rising arc, and it sweeps to capture the frustration of childlessness. Credit for some of the resonant scenes should go to Ladipo Abiola’s camerawork and Adesuwa Amon and Adio Solanke’s editing: Lanre’s frenzy driving home for a timed intercourse with his wife, with the hope of inseminating her on schedule; shot after shot of helpless desperation, in which Roselyn, a woman who has been taking life for granted, confronts her infertility; a teary, shamed Evelyn dragging her sister out of her house. The writing is attentive enough to capture that aftermath when the relationship first cracks, when Evelyn, having locked her sister outside, calls Lanre: “You need to talk some sense into your wife,” Evelyn says, the woman who once was “my sister” now referred to as “your wife.”
But as it drives towards its well-earned climax, the series stutters with plot inconsistencies, with explanatory scenes undermining previous ones, like how long it takes Lanre’s mother to realize what has happened. Muna Abii’s Evelyn is not given enough width to sell her character’s descent to the edges of farce. An accident is contrived in the most clichéd way to circumvent a tricky entanglement of plotting, nosing the story into melodrama. And it makes no sense that the two sisters knowingly have the same therapist. Their climactic conversation in the therapist’s office is an ambitious scene that required tested thespians, and Montana and Abii, especially the latter, hit and miss. Yet Montana here, in the latter episodes, is in fine form.
Roses & Ivy is about those co-dependencies that seem special — family, romance — only because the ironies of the world have not caught up with them. It is stories like this, stories that explore both interpersonal dynamics and societal problems and burrow into the heart, that call back to the emotionally rich flicks of early Nollywood and suggest a way out of the industry’s current struggle with authentic storytelling. ♦
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