On Different Grounds review – Cupid’s-conspiracy romcom brings Nollywood and Bollywood together

It’s a stretch for this Nigerian romcom to bill itself “the first Nollywood-Bollywood collaboration” based on the fact that it features, in Nimesh Diliprai Desai and Vineet Raina, two fringe Indian players on a sprawling wedding-invite list. But the two industries do indeed have much common ground, such as big-hearted family values and a penchant for grand gestural emotions that, in the case of Mildred Okwo’s somewhat heavy-footed film, trample on some promising concepts and narrative plausibility.

Silk-tressed bachelorette Aurora (Abena Akuaba) is being browbeaten by her businessman dad Eyimofe (Bob-Manuel Udokwu) to marry snoozefest suitor Tobore (Ifeanyi Kalu). She is hardly enthused when he parrots his criteria for embarking on “a collaboration with an individual or brand”: “value check, common interest, due diligence and critical analysis.” (Tobore ticks the boxes.) But she agrees to set a date on one condition: that Eyimofe must invite her mother, Isioma (Jennifer Eliogu) – booted out by Eyimofe many years back for wanting to pursue her career – to the big day.

Aurora’s plan to rekindle romance in her uptight executive dad is a sly, fun starting point – made even more urgent when success on that front becomes critical to the future of her secret childhood crush on Rajesh (Raina), a pristine-bouffanted dreamboat. But this Cupid’s conspiracy, which might have made a fine 1940s screwball, nosedives in Okwo’s hands, as she sandwiches agonisingly leaden farce (such as the cough Aurora suddenly develops in Rajesh’s presence) between slabs of family melodrama.

Akuaba, moreover, acts with a detached air of someone on a couple of diazepam, not mustering much chemistry with Rajesh, or anti-chemistry with Tobore, to suggest a woman vacillating on an emotional hotplate. Luckily, there is plenty of compensating zip elsewhere in the cast – especially Nkem Owoh and Ebele Okaro’s Igbo uncle and aunt, with their strong greetings game – and fibrous social satire in the interactions between the wedding party’s various Igbo, Itsekiri and Yoruba affiliations. Little of it, unfortunately, is integrated into the romantic chicanery – but the rowdy nuptial energy just about keeps the show on the road.