Day Five of AFI Fest 2008 represented a new opportunity at the festival for me: the ability to see films on weekdays. Last year, I was still going to school full-time in San Diego, so I was only able to catch weekend programming. While I would not take advantage of Tuesday or Wednesday’s line-ups due to my fixation on the presidential election, it was nice to be able to see a few selections on Monday and Thursday.The day before a black man would become the President elect of the United States, I saw Anthony Fabian’s Skin, the true story of a South African woman named Sandra Liang (Sophie Okonedo) who was denied the rights her white parents and brother enjoyed because she was born with brown skin acquired from generations-old genes. Think of the opposite of the Anthony Hopkins character in The Human Stain, only living in a culture where being black meant being oppressed.
The most interesting part of Skin is not the rare genetic inheritance that long pained the life of its protagonist. Instead, it’s how the people around Sandra respond to her skin color. After a short flash-forward in time, the viewer is first introduced to Sandra when she is a young girl (played by Ella Ramangwane). Her parents are enrolling her in the same whites-only school as her older brother. Sandra is allowed to attend despite an apprehensive administration, but she is soon kicked out when a racist teacher makes up a reason to beat and boot her, causing her father (Sam Neill) to engage in battle with the government over her official race. One would think he’d become a tolerant guy because of the ensuing hardships, but he doesn’t at all. When Sandra begins to date his general store’s black supplier, her father immediately tries to end it because of the man’s race. In other words: he thinks it’s a-OK to persecute blacks, just not his black-appearing daughter because she has white parents. And the chaos doesn’t stop there. After Sandra marries the man and shuns her family as a result, he turns out to be abusive, suggesting that she was subconsciously attracted to him because he possessed the very same tragically violent qualities embodied by her father.
While Skin tells a remarkable story drenched in painstaking themes about fate, it isn’t a remarkable film. This is primarily because storywriter/director Anthony Fabian sticks to a rote approach to his narrative. He embraces Hollywood Style to an unhealthy extent in that the film becomes stuck in the standard “true-story” mold and the characters are never explored in detail on stylistic or thematic levels. Fabian clearly chose a simple structure so that he could convey the true story factually—when introducing the film, he made sure to point out everything onscreen was true—but in doing so he robbed Skin of its emotional authenticity. In other words, Fabian invested so much of his attention in sticking to the facts that he didn’t have any time to flesh out his characters emotionally, meaning that they are not in fact entirely honest representations of real people because they do not reflect many of the emotions essential to the story. Had Fabian allowed his actors to reach a little bit more in their work—perhaps embellishing a bit, but discovering greater truths in the process—Skin would’ve been a better movie. (Given Sophie Okenedo’s previous performances, we all know that she especially could’ve turned a good lead performance into a tour-de-force had the movie’s style and structure provided her more room to roam.)
Alas, Skin is a lot like many of the other films that have been made about the human tragedies committed in Africa’s recent history, certainly not as inspired as the memorable ones. Viewers interested in the general subject-matter will do far better renting the Okonedo-starrer Hotel Rwanda or the also-South Africa-based Tsotsi instead.
2-1/2 Buckets out of 4.
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