Umjolo: Day Ones 2024 Movie Review
Fikile Mogodi’s Umjolo: Day Ones is the second installment in a series that pivots around relationships whose facades are kept up only to eventually crumble. One of the characters will be a cheater; this will bring severe ramifications, sending shockwaves through the structures of families. Lives have to be rearranged dramatically. There are latent signs of recognition but also waves of denial.
The film stars Andile (Khumbulani Kay Sibiya) and Zanele (Sibusisiwe Jili). The two have been best friends since high school. However, their closeness has bred several speculations. Their relationship has forever been the cynosure of gossip and ribbing. That didn’t pause even after Andile married someone else, Jessica (Trix Vivier).
Andile and Jessica seemingly are happily married together with two daughters. But Jessica isn’t quite accepted by Andile’s father. She’s white and that sets her apart from Andile’s family circles. Jessica tries with all her best efforts to mingle. She plans a big birthday party for Andile’s father yet he is not impressed. That Andile and Jessica don’t have a son who can further the family’s legacy bugs him and he keeps Jessica at bay, despite her kind enthusiasm. It’s humiliating to her but she endures it anyway, mad in love with Andile and prepared to accept anything for it.
Things go south at a high school reunion that Andile and Zanele attend. Everyone starts joking about the degree of their closeness, despite their insistence on the best-friend nature of their equation. Yet, everyone bays for their hidden romantic interest in each other. A kiss and dare session erupts and the two give in to it. They share a kiss which sets loose a storm of sexual passion and romance both see in the other. The morning after, they have regrets but something is tapped in Andile. He can’t resist seeing her but she immediately establishes distance.
Jessica is the hapless person in the whole mess. It’s frustrating to watch Andile drag the women through a slop of his indecision and hurt them constantly just by dint of his convenience. One time, he professes his love to Jessica, who is justifiably heartbroken. Quickly, he seems to move on. The minute he sees Zanele in person, all the emotions well up.
Meanwhile, Zanele also starts dating a lifestyle lounge owner, Sbu Sishi. He is persistent in romantically chasing her, though she is initially reluctant. To get away from Andile occupying her mind, she decides to give Sbu a shot. At Andile and Jessica’s house, the former is cold to Sbu, who they had invited to dinner. Andile is envious of Zanele’s growing intimacy with Sbu. He tells her he wants to be with her. Jessica overhears this and is heartbroken.
Jessica warns Zanele to stay away and sever all contact with her family. She complies, explaining she is not at all invested in Andile in a romantic capacity. However, things don’t go smoothly even now. She suddenly discovers she’s pregnant. All this while, she was under the notion she could not be pregnant. Some miracle seems to have happened. Things with Sbu had been going rocky of late but she tries to go back to him, telling him the child is his when in fact it is Andile’s.
Andile realizes the child is his. He doesn’t protest at his parentage not being recognized with great urgency or earnestness. What gets his goat is the discovery that unfurls at the baby shower which was being live-streamed on social media. It is how he discovers the child is a boy. He had yearned to have a son for years. It was the wish of his father as well. He can’t rein himself in any longer. He storms to the baby shower, demanding his fatherhood to be recognized by her. Sbu realizes he has been deceived by Zanele yet again. He leaves her, heartbroken.
Neither does she return romantically to Andile. Jessica leaves Andile, taking their daughters with her. What remains of the relationship between once-best friends, Andile and Zanele, is just a matter of joint custody and its ensuing convenience. The relationship has turned cold. They just share the concern over their son and what’s best for him.
The film is a reckoning with the subterranean glimpses of the cracks in relationships, the lies we tell ourselves to sustain ties with others that should better be taken out in the open. There’s repression, hiding, assuaging oneself that certain emotions are no longer valid since time has passed. What does it take to put back the pieces where they ought to have been long ago? Certainly, the path to such a realization is riddled with hurt and bruised egos and all sorts of terrible, cowardly decisions.
However, the film only hints at these ruptures, lightning bolts of realizations, without attempting to mine the inherent emotional weight. The characters hurt each other and deflect the pain as long as they can. What does it imply for them, the damage they emotionally carry with themselves while shoving away the truth of their situations? The scenes spring sporadically, such as the reconciliations after a stormy end of a relationship. Hearts reopen up. Two partners get the short shrift, as casualties of the ultimate relationship between Andile and Zanele. Everybody thought they’d get together but they remained best friends. The heat of a dare, however, breaks the façade of their intimacy, as Andile confronts his true romantic feelings for her.
There are too many unfortunate missteps in the film. Firstly, the characterization is so slim and perfunctory that you would struggle to ascribe any sober thought to the actions. Every scene plays out like a cheap, worn-out derivation of the staple drama of couples in crisis. There’s no specificity to the dilemmas and circumstances that lend them a surge of potent heartbreak and betrayal. We know what’s coming and the predictability is further aggravated by a lack of emotional texture, a particular detailing to the shifting connections among characters. There’s so much heartbreak and casual manipulation in Umjolo: Day Ones but the emotional windfall never accrues.
