The loneliest queue on earth is the unemployment queue. Try as you might to strike partnerships, to draw inspiration from friends and family, to fortify yourself with platitudes of encouragement, the loneliness of circumstance still sits with you. And it can lead you down very dark paths. It is the honesty in this loneliness that Idiagi Ernest Eromosele tries to capture in The Long Wait.
Drawing from personal experiences, the writer-director lays out the bleak reality of the unemployed graduate in a Nigerian clime. The scarcity of social contact, the barrage of rejections, and the dirtiness that comes with accepting failure. The cinematography is intimate, resting on the dirty plates with buzzing insects, the hard dissonant words in the application and rejection mails, and his pointless walks to the same spot through the city of Lagos. Accompanying those is the unassuming, bespectacled lead.
There is an ordinariness to the film that leaves it relatable. The color is as bleak as the narrative tone. And the out-of-place pre-recorded call conversation, as if this man we see holding the phone isn’t having that conversation in the moment, as if it is a conversation he has had so many times, so many times.
The Long Wait is an honest film. I find the end a tad melodramatic, but at its core there is a truthfulness to the gruelling nature of unemployment that it captures, and in turn, a truthfulness to the gruelling nature of being human. That is what films should do.
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