“Umjolo: The Gone Girl” (2024) is the silliest, non-committal derivation that just pretends to be a rom-com but has neither comic flair nor the tingling crackle of romantic tension. It’s a flat, purposeless, and increasingly dull drama circling adultery and the lies bubbling in a supposedly perfect relationship.
Umjolo: The Gone Girl (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
A Tale of Love, Betrayal, and Oversights
“Umjolo: The Gone Girl” circles several characters, whose lives crisscross. But there’s not much consequence or significance that threads them together. It’s more casual and thoughtless and prone only to bland romcom derivations. It threads together narratives of infidelity and manipulation, covering it up as a force of habit that can’t be looked at with seriousness. There should be some leeway and scope for understanding. Some mistakes should be overlooked. That’s how the men in the film pitch their philandering to their enraged partners. There’s the obvious bitter reaction when the philandering gets discovered. But the film is really unconcerned with reflecting on the damage.
Lethu and Lucky are the poster couple in the film. At least that’s how it starts before things fray and fallouts erupt. Their relationship seems perfect and smooth. They can’t keep their hands off each other despite being together for a while. Lethu is head over heels in love, forsaking her social life for the relationship that envelops her entirely.
What Happens When Trust Collides with Betrayal?
Lethu can’t see beyond it. She’s stuck in a beady-eyed full faith. It doesn’t bug her that he is taking up a lot of her time and space. She’s happily giving it away. She’s just comfortably besotted with him. What throws her world upside down is when she gets diagnosed with Chlamydia. It immediately shakes her that the man she believed so much in, her partner for life has had other sexual encounters – that he has lied to her shatters her.
Lucky gets the bolstering confidence to be frivolous to this degree from his brother who is a habitual cheater. This track is kept at some distance from the central one between Lucky and Lethu. It’s only when Lucky visits him and gets all these unhealthy ideas about philandering indulgence that we see a reflection. The difference is his brother is absolutely open and honest in his habits. So his wife is fully aware.
Why does Lethu try to end the relationship?
Leth immediately tries to snip the relationship with Lucky. She establishes her distance. He pleads with her to understand he only loves her. But it’s a question of almost fifteen women he has had sexual encounters with. How can she get over it? She has to process the hurt.
Umjolo: The Gone Girl (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
Does Lethu stay with Lucky?
He pleads with Lethu to forgive his mistakes. There’s also Lethu’s friend Amanda with whom he has been in an illicit relationship, not known to Lethu. Despite Amanda’s insistence, Lethu agrees to re-enter the relationship with Lucky. She proposes an open one. He doesn’t take kindly to the offer, immediately displaying his double standards. Then they revert to the conventional order of a relationship, fully monogamous. Soon however it turns back into an open one, though she stated that each should know the other’s status of sexual encounters with strangers.
For a while, she is back in the happy bubble of the relationship. She wants to go on dates with others but the thought of Lucky invades it ultimately. Perhaps she needed a final knell for her so that she could put the nail on a toxic relationship with Lucky. In the film’s rather hurried climax, she is in the middle of arranging for a wedding when she catches Lucky red-handed with Amanda. That’s all it takes. She calls it quits and surges ahead into the happiness she denied herself in the mistaken belief he’d changed his ways.
Umjolo: The Gone Girl (2024) Movie Review:
Fikile Mogodi’s film carries the imprimatur of Netflix’s South Africa storytelling slate. This isn’t particularly a rooted narrative, dwelling instead in a coterie of cliches, superficial characters, and the great desire to flex its romcom appetite. It takes wit and sharp awareness to render a film fresh, saucy, and tangy, especially when it traverses such terrain. Instead of freshness what exists in surfeit is a baggage of weary tropes and templates propping up black men as essentially unreliable philanderers with no moral compass. They cheat away on their wives with no compunction and such insistence like their lives hinge on it. They are also manipulators, gaslighting partners to luxuriate in their convenient narrators benefiting just themselves.
It’s quite troubling when you peel away the facade of lightness and frolic and dig into the implications. However, the film is barely interested in creating characters we can care for or even take some curiosity in. Everyone is just etched in broad strokes. Lucky is fixated on being the cheater. His longtime girlfriend and fiance, Lethu, spends the bulk of the film being dazed in love. The rest of the narrative has her grappling with the discovery of his infidelity. It’s not just one or two but more than ten women he has been within a year. The enormity of his tendency deeply shakes her. Yet she doesn’t lose all love for him. He too keeps drifting back to her, appealing to her to forgive him.
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Lethu and Lucky have the appearance of the quintessentially perfect couple. They have been dating for years. Everything between them seems shiny and rosy to an outsider. Lethu is averse to having the comfortable bubble prick. She’s angry and hurt, of course, but also not entirely shut out against him. She gives him a chance to confess his mistakes. However, he is a habitual, sly, slimy offender. He can’t change his ways despite all assurances. Thuli Zuma’s screenplay just about skims the clashes and heartbreak. It almost seems cold and indifferent to the conflicts and dilemmas of its two central characters. There’s also a parallel track about Lucky’s brother who’s also a habitual cheater. It’s just mined for lazy humor, none of which lands and situates the brother’s wife through a lens of caricature.
The performances too just scrape through, though you can’t blame either Tyson Mathonsi or Sibongiseni Shezi when the screenplay gives them next to nothing with which to register the characters’ confusion and anguish. The film is bogged down by its needlessly meandering narrative until you realize there’s nothing holding the film together. It doesn’t know how to wield its characters or understand the tone of a situation. It just rushes by.
