It’s a pleasing sight to stumble across rom-coms that aren’t of the American crop. Diversity matters even more across all genres, and at first glance, Thabang Moleya’s directorial, “Lobola Man,” is a wonderful prospect. However, it being released in Zulu, it turns out, has had little impact on affecting into place any authenticity and individuality. Soon into the film, it morphs into yet another tiringly generic, barely vivid romcom that struggles to distinguish itself. At best, it’s an inoffensive time-killer, and at worst, its routine dullness and one-dimensional characters moving through unconvincing scenarios will induce sheer annoyance in you.
Problems littering Katleho Ramaphakela’s screenplay are too many. Besides the critical question of credence in the events, so much of it is just plain sluggish and uninteresting you’ll have a tough task investing in any of the characters. All characters popping up have been written with the depth of cardboard. In places, trauma is flung in as if to refine the credentials of the conflicts. It doesn’t help that the central lobola premise is so thinly etched. From what I understood, it’s some sort of a bride price paid by the groom as a gesture of gratitude to the bride’s family. Ace ( Lawrence Maleka) is a lobola negotiator.
In other words, he is a low-time scammer who helps men navigate ways to reduce the lobola price they have to pay. Ace is a terrific charmer, easily sliding into people’s hearts and creating the strongest impression that he has to do his job well. It’s a risky job where the cover can be blown at any time, and the crisis may snowball to unsalvageable heights. The worst consequence is that the entire marriage might get called off. So, the stakes are pretty high. However, Ace is confident in his skills. He has been doing it for a while despite being aware of the complications that can escalate at any moment.
When a new client, Duke ( Vincent Mahlangu), hires him, the assignment quickly reveals itself as an unusually tricky one. He is required to be a hustler of a different sort and employ smarts that hitherto he hadn’t felt the need to. Duke’s bride turns out to be Zandile ( Kwanele Mthethwa), a woman he had met previously under not so favourable circumstances.
Ace schemes to impersonate Duke’s distant cousin and try to bring in a fake family. But things don’t go according to plan. Neither Zandi nor her father are unsuspecting fools, and it’s really questionable why Ace and Duke could even think up the plan they do when it’s just so blatantly silly and prone to being flagged as wholly specious. The emotional trajectory Duke, Ace, and Zandi go through is rife with predictable realizations, including the stalest, uninspired sequence where the characters discover the full degree of their attraction to each other.
Even the idea of conjuring the fake family comes off as just something to peg an unfunny scene that has to pivot on disability to the most unnecessary ends. As broad as the direction of the film is, it is also riven by confusion about how to handle and steer the narrative in a direction where the choices would make sense on a fundamental, emotional level. Of course, you can see right off the bat where the film might be hurtling. Hidden emotions surface and unexpected attractions stem.
There are efforts made to suppress the swell of new liking, but in vain. The impulse is already too mighty. “Lobola Man” especially suffers on account of a blunder of a final stretch that negates so much preceding tension by bunging in a vital father-son conversation on grabbing love unapologetically, no matter the repercussion. It all culminates in the most hackneyed proposal scene that drowns the entire film in a muddle of eye-roll-level atrociousness.
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