Running Away

    Uche Chukwu's Run is an uninhibited, creative and morally complex film that operates outside of the confines of Western genre tropes. It contains comedy, action, drama and horror in fairly equal parts; though Hollywood bends genre often, almost no Hollywood films incorporate these many genre elements in one work.
    Chukwu uses the narrative to opine on various issues relating to women's rights. The lead, Tomilola Wright (Kiki Omeili), runs through a city, constantly pursued by men trying to kill or assault her for varying reasons. Most of the narrative takes place at night, which adds to the unsettling tone. The clearest takeaway from the film is the difficulty of being a woman in a largely populated area. None of the men that Tomilola encounters seem trustworthy; or if they do seem trustworthy at first, we suspect that they will betray her, which almost every man in the film does. She encounters a sex worker who is being exploited by a customer, and a woman giving birth on the ground instead of at a hospital. 
    The most important point that Chukwu makes with Run is the impact that one person can have on the community at large. As Tomilola runs around the city, she intervenes in various situations to try to make the city a better place, such as telling a person off for littering or trying to get a woman giving birth to a hospital. Because Tomilola takes the time and effort to try to help the people around her, the narrative rewards her. Earlier in the film, Chukwu conditions us to distrust bystanders, as they create more problems for Tomilola than solutions. However, the twist in the narrative comes in the form of two innocent bystanders, who intervene when Tomilola has lost hope.
    Chukwu's film grammar is unique when viewed from a Western perspective. The aesthetic choices in Run are largely successful. In a few scenes, there are cuts that do not imply any passage of time that contain the same subject (for example, a jogging sequence cuts from a tracking shot of Tomilola to another shot of her jogging from a similar angle). The cut serves no purpose outside of contributing to the aesthetic of the scene. Was this a carefully calculated sequence, or was it improvised? Does it matter? It is reminiscent of the sequence from Breathless in which Godard cuts from shot to shot of the same subject (the lead, Jean Seberg, as she rides in the car with Belmondo). Breathless and Run both came out at times of formal innovation and democratization of the means of film production.
still from Breathless (1960)


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Comments

  1. AmyNovember 30, 2020 at 8:50 AM

    I think that your observation that both Run and Breathless come about at a time of innovation and democratization of the film medium is really an important one. Both France in the postwar period and contemporary Nigeria have proven to be very fruitful moments for film innovation partly because the political and social instability allow for the emergence of film practice outside of traditional filmmaking institutions. Our current moment in the US is presenting some of these same possibilities in relationship to new media forms.

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