As Lara and her sister Dara are removed from their mansion following the allegation of tax fraud levelled against their father’s company, one of the stern men from the Lagos Revenue Service accidentally breaks Lara’s glass-framed portrait of Beyoncé.
This causes Lara to squeal in slow, agonising shock, a rich-girl whine of a sound that doesn’t stop as she lunges forward to hurt the man. She’s wearing the Lucia dress from designer Ré Bahia – a colourful, diaphanous look which graced the Lagos Fashion & Design Week runway in 2015.
“Upon reading the script, I knew the fashion would be a characteristic in the story similar to pictures such as “Devils Wear Prada” or “Sex and the City,” director Tosin Coker said in an interview with The BAM Reporter, “We felt fashion and music harboured keys to our cultural identity.”
From the opening shot, Lara and the Beat announces itself as a fashion topography. The Giwa sisters, played by Seyi Shay and Somkele Iyamah, are on a private boat wearing a beach ensemble in neon orange and teal green, ensconced in the seemingly assuring wealth of their parents. In one early scene, Dara (Somkele) walks into a board meeting in her father’s company wearing a bubblegum-pink dress with an exaggerated puff to its sleeves, as if to give her air of insouciance more weight.
“Every characters look was unique to them,” Tolu Olusoga, the producer of LATB said, “The sisters Lara and Dara Giwa will easily be identified on screen by their costume and style.”
Styled by Bella Adeleke and Zina Anumudu, Lara and the Beat gives its characters the outlet to be expressive with their wardrobe, even if it’s a DIY crop top which Lara suitably wears to disrupt the lunch date of her cheating boyfriend Jide, played by DJ Xclusive. Vector, making his sophomore Nollywood appearance, uses clothes to lean towards his rap persona. Face caps, t-shirts, denim, boots, sunglasses. He plays Sla or Mr. Beats, a studio manager with music aspirations and a penchant for cars and bikes, the latter utilised to facilitate his predictable relationship with Lara.
Musically, hitmaker Tee-Y Mix was tapped to produce the original motion picture soundtrack for the movie. While thumbing through The BAM Reporter magazine, I had half-expected to see Sarz taking custody of the movie’s sound palette. Having worked with top artistes over the years like Iyanya and even Seyi Shay herself, Tee-Y Mix synthesises a sound infrastructure to render scenes emotive: “You really have to immerse yourself in the story, let the film be your muse.”
Seyi Shay and Vector reel out songs like I like It and Gidi Life; Toni Tones, who plays Lara’s friend Trish sporting electric-blue hair, renders the spicy, summery Shemileshe; Rampage Recordings artiste Myro features on the soundtrack too, including Ogranya Jable Osai, CLL, and Soti.
Aside the original soundtrack, other songs were sourced from Ajebutter 22, Adey, Tomi Owo, Show Dem Camp, Zirra (formerly Timmy T), and Lady Donli. Towards the end of the movie, music literally prevails and saves the day, in a string of scenes which I won’t spoil. Honing her talent for music in the aftermath of the tax scandal that leaves them broke, Lara flexes her vocals under Sla’s supervision and engineers an album, while Dara tries photography and the experimental films no one is interested in watching.
Fashion and music are the connective tissues that holds Lara and the Beat together, papering over the lapses of less than stellar character development. And just like in its title, Lara is nothing without the beat.
When Bernard Dayo isn’t writing about pop culture, he’s watching horror movies and reading comics and trying to pretend his addiction to Netflix isn’t a serious condition.
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