Half of a Yellow Sun

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Half Of A Yellow Sun is a good film, but nowhere near as good as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel from which it is adapted.

But let’s not have a debate about book adaptations: a good book is always far more complex and subtle than the subsequent film and assessing the quality of one against the other is to compare apples and pears. They simply are different.

To compress Adichie’s superb book about two couples caught up in the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s into two hours, director Biyi Bandele, Nigerian-born novelist and playwright, not only chooses to simplify the story and concentrate on one of the couples but also opts for a more straightforward narrative, with no jumps backwards and forwards in time.

But that doesn’t matter: what matters is whether it works as a film in its own right rather than as a visual version of the book. It does, though in the process it loses chunks of plot and character development, notably one of the sophisticated twin sisters, glamorous daughters of a successful businessman.

We are still left with a good story, with the emphasis on the sister (Thandie Newton) who throws in her lot with a radical academic (Chiwetel Ejiofor).  One of the losers in the adaptation is the couple’s steward, who is left in the film but is never given life. Even the maps complete with dotted lines to show international audiences where Nigerian  towns are situated and the occasional newsreel clips and journalists’ summaries which sketch in the country’s political and military events are reasonably unobtrusive.

And it’s great to see a film about Africa that isn’t built around a white guy, though a white British academic is part of the foursome.

This is a top quality mainstream film, well acted and shot: far more Hollywood than Nollywood.

Newton has compared it to Gone with the Wind because her character, “even when she has a chance to leave, to get on a flight that costs god knows how much, to join her wealthy parents to get out of there, she chooses not to because she is involved in this struggle that comes from the roots and the people. .. Because it is about the complete transformation of a person as well as a place.”

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