In fact, Femi Jacobs’ Makinde Esho, the businessman whose efforts to secure the titular meeting is frustrated by her, is the one through whose eyes we see the story, and he has more screen time, and even a romantic storyline on the side. “She delivered a stellar performance.” Clara’s reception room is only one half of the plot of The Meeting. “While we were filming, there wasn’t a moment that Rita dropped the ball on her character,” her co-star Nse Ikpe-Etim told me. But even as Clara makes you laugh, Dominic doesn’t let you forget that this kind of frustration is real, that the doors of government offices are often where dreams are dashed. Even though she is Igbo, even though it is a country where ethnicity is often a ticket to political access, she mistreats everyone of every ethnicity equally - her allegiance is solely to class. She lets The Minister’s mistress, played by Nse Ikpe-Etim, into his office, to the chagrin of waiting visitors, whom she then invites to buy the soft drinks and recharge cards she sells, while still ignoring their efforts to use purchases as bribes. She delivers side eyes to the people waiting, she reschedules their appointments without telling them, she gets security to throw them out when they protest too much, all the while chewing gum with alacrity. Clara, with her makeup-wrinkled face, is the latter. There are people who delight in frustrating other people and then there are devils you cannot bargain with. Last May, for example, there were tweets praising Dominic in The Meeting as “ one of the best Nollywood performances ever.” What it also means is that people increasingly revisit standout performances in new appreciation. These days, though, with a sharper audience no longer willing to substitute storytelling for flashy photography, most subpar acting would be roasted on social media. But back then, in 2012, when the idea of New Nollywood, with its better cinematography, was only taking root - with support from then president Goodluck Jonathan, who ironically endorsed the film - not many viewers would have cared much if any actor had been subpar in such a scene. Rita Dominic Is on the March 2023 Cover of Open Country Mag.Īt the time The Meeting premiered, Dominic was already one of the industry’s superstars, with almost 15 years of work. For me, that’s one of the ways of knowing people who really understand what acting means.” She’s so good at giving you almost the same thing every single take, with the same emotion, and you can edit her easily because she doesn’t mess up the continuity.
“That was a lesson I learned, because the more takes we took the more she got into character.
“I should have done a cut out of her doing that but I felt it wouldn’t have been as spontaneous,” Okwo told me. And they would have seen it had it not been for cameras that were focused higher and did not move with the actor. Power is a game that informed Nigerians play at the right time, with the right person, and this is Abuja, the country’s capital, where everyone knows who is who, especially people like Clara whose power are fickle in principle but terrifying in practice.ĭominic cleaning the floor with her hair was a minor detail but the kind of deep delve into character that viewers were not accustomed to seeing onscreen in Nollywood. Yet when the oba enters, she falls on her knees in delight, an act of complete subservience, and the people in the reception gape at her in shock. To the roomful of Nigerians complaining and waiting on her whims, she is the tin deity that must be placated. By deciding who gets to see The Minister and who doesn’t, all based on her mood swings, she is a power broker. In the sequence that missed making it into the film, Dominic is not just kneeling but hunching even lower, wiping the floor with not only her hands but her hair.Ĭlara Ikemba is no ordinary receptionist. She is kneeling on the floor, almost praising him with her hands. In the final cut, the female lead character Clara Ikemba, played by Rita Dominic, is greeting an oba, a Yoruba traditional ruler, who has just arrived at the office of The Honourable Minister, where she is the receptionist. She and her team had shot a key scene over and over, but in the editing, she found that they’d missed a detail. During the final days of post-production for The Meeting, the 2012 comedy that helped set a new quality standard in Nollywood, the director Mildred Okwo had a problem.
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