In Showmax’s Bobo, by director Maurice Muendo, the titular character (played by Faith Muthoni) has a problem. She needs money to pursue a degree in engineering, while an unpaid loan for her mother’s operation has local crime lord Biggie (Dennis Manduve) circling with Shylockian appetites. Her Auntie Grace (Louisa Sialo) comes up with a plan attached to the Miss Nairobi 2025, a pageant that awards its winner three million Kenyan shillings…
Set in the Mathare Valley Slum of Nairobi, Bobo is one of seven debut features from Showmax’s Joburg Film Festival-affiliated incubator. The film is about one girl’s courage to aspire beyond the stark realities of her environment, an aspiration that’s reflected in the lives of three other characters. There’s the ubiquitous Marcus (Michael Ndaka) who stakes his claim to the better life on photography. There’s Auntie Grace who dreams of owning a fashion brand. And then there’s Sly (Kelly Njeri Gathoni), a lady who is also contesting for Miss Nairobi 2025.
Through these characters, Muende examines the quiet seduction of moral compromise. Two of the characters are enmeshed in Biggie’s gang, the other’s conscience has been beaten by circumstance.
It is a feature typical of this kind of setup that Bobo must never be in danger of moral failure. Though she is hit by setbacks in succession and tempted with an easy win, she must never succumb, so that there’s a contrast with her counterparts. And yet, it is never quite clear that Bobo succeeds through the strength of her character. She just never grapples.
Muthoni is amazing. She acquits herself quite well with the cherubic disposition demanded of the role. In scenes requiring teardrops, she oozes such vulnerability that one has no problem believing she is a child—which is exactly what her character is.
Saved by its supporting characters, Maurice Muendo’s Showmax Original wobbles towards a moralising end. Efiko Score: 5.5/10
But for a few lines of dialogue, there is no way to detect her passion for engineering. When she hops into modeling, it comes rather easily, as though she also desired that line of work. At no point, does she come to stand up to her bully. The cumulative effect of these gaps in characterisation is that Bobo doesn’t come alive as a person forging through bad experiences. She just is, untouched by experiences sliding over her like water off a duck’s back.
In contrast, rising out of the very same hardscrabble soil as Bobo, Biggie and Sly take a muscular approach to fate. Their ascent requires standing on the necks of others. Never has a villain been as bubbly and cheerful as Gathoni’s Sly. And looking oddly reminiscent of Bryan Tyree Henry’s Paper Boi (from US series Atlanta), Manduve’s Biggie is perfectly pitched. His menace reverberates in high places, yet he remains a neighborhood thug. One wonders if this smallness is why his and Sly’s schemes never account for the possibility of winners other than Bobo. Or maybe they’re just aware of the kind of contest they’re dealing with.
But all pretenses to the kind of suspense that would require guessing if any other contestant, outside of Sly or Bobo, would emerge as Miss Nairobi 2025 are abandoned early. The pageant is obviously a two-woman show. The other contestants have neither style nor seriousness; they are decorations at best. Indeed, the pageant sequences lack energy and imagination. There is neither magic in the makeover, nor thrill in the competition.
In the end, Bobo is an easy film. It never risks, never surprises. It merely glides toward a contrived final act meant to deliver a moralising sermon on sanctity and Grace. The meek shall inherit the earth and whatnot.
But isn’t that a sermon best left for Sunday school?
Showmax’s BOBO is now streaming.
