$1: One Dollar

Having never watched a Nigerian video film before, I wasn't sure what to expect from this. In all fairness, I didn't have high hopes; I've occasionally paused on Nigerian movie channels while channel surfing and never been particularly impressed: low production values, poor sound, questionable performances and a distinct lack of movement.

$1 has all of these, but it still manages to provided passable – if overlong – entertainment, thanks largely to the performances of the couple who play parents of a young girl who has taken the fancy of a young man who has moved to America (details on IMDb are so scant that I couldn't tell you their names). They both provide broadly comic performances, anyway, as they begin lording it over their neighbours because they believe they will be following their daughter to America after she has wed her betrothed. Although their daughter already has a perfectly acceptable boyfriend, her and her parent's heads are turned by the promise of riches from the States. Her intended sends over dollars and clothes (in one priceless scene the mother emerges from her shack in the stifling heat wearing a winter woollie and a beanie hat) which the parents wear to show off their impending wealth. The father takes to smoking a pipe his future son-in-law has sent, and derides, with grandiose good humour, his neighbours for the paltriness of their ambitions.

The film isn't really a dig at America as such until the final couple of reels when the future son-in-law pays a visit. He's supposed to be a mechanical engineer, but he dresses, acts and swears like some over-the-edge rapper, and is clearly intended as a symbol of the consequences of a western materialistic society where possession of goods is more important than the love and respect of family and friends. Before his arrival, the film contents itself with gently mocking the increasing pervasiveness of American culture as it spreads around the world (the actual word 'America' must be spoken about 300 times during the course of the film). And even as the arrival of the American dream rapidly and irrationally disintegrates into a violent nightmare, the hapless father still clings to his belief that America and its residents represent everything to which he (and we) should aspire