Aloevera - Nonsense Division
Thoughts On: Aloevera (2020)
Two families in the same village are generationally divided until love threatens to bridge the gap.
Aloevera is a nicely shot parable with pretty set design and pristine lighting. It composes an allegory on tribalism and the often meaningless lines drawn between sub-cultures in western Africa, locating the mirror we end up facing in living on lines of difference. In such, it presents families and people as colours that naturally mix - rather than simply paint, which can be oil or water-based, therefore incapable in certain instances of amalgamation. Perceiving the surface skin of things - something equivalent to paint - dilemmas such as the "chicken and egg" debate develop relevance. I was always befuddled by this silly debate upon which the narrative of Aloevera builds from. Since I was a child, I had always thought that the answer was clear; What came first, the chicken or the egg: the dinosaur of course. Trapped in binary thinking, the essence of things being their basic name, one can never see the more simple truth of things - such as the genuine origin of an entity such as the chicken or the egg. The chicken and the egg share an evolutionary duality; from every egg came a new life, from each new life a new egg: there is not one egg or one chicken across time, but a common ancestor uniting them. Such is true of people. As the allegory of Aloevera suggests, we are not oil and water based paints of differing shades, but colours that naturally merge just as they do distinguish themselves from one another.
As pleasant as this allegory is as a visual and parabolic evocation, the script of Aloevera drags things out rather unnecessarily. The dialogue is sluggish and dull; the plot is predictable and lacking drama. Condensed to a short without dialogue, this would work far better as a cinematic piece. As is, the theatricality is slightly grinding, detracting from the somewhat profound subtext. Technically speaking, however, this is a very nice slice of Ghanaian cinema.
