An improbable true story of bloodlines and color lines,
“Skin” dramatizes the life of Sandra Laing, a black girl born to
white Afrikaner parents in apartheid-era South Africa.
Sandra’s birth certificate classified her as white, though a
genetic quirk had given her dark skin and curly hair. In her youth Sandra
attended a whites-only school where her appearance created an uproar. She was
reclassified as colored under apartheid laws, and her parents mounted a
judicial challenge to establish her “whiteness.”
Sandra’s life story is quietly devastating. Her experience
is a tour through a society where racial delineations that make little sense
were legally all-important and personally crucial. Sandra’s decision of what
racial identity to choose redirected her into a life of hardship among
oppressed blacks and estrangement from her family.
A provocative personal history is no guarantee of a
compelling biography, however. “Skin” is heartfelt but clumsy. It
feels hurried, looks cheap, and works overtime to simplify a complex, flawed
character into a noble, tragic heroine. The film speaks fluent cliche.
Sam Neill and Alice Krige play Sandra’s parents, shopkeepers
in a rural township. Abraham treats their African customers with chilly
disdain, depositing change on the counter rather than place it in a black man’s
hand. His wife Sannie is a warmer kind of racist, her unseemly friendliness
toward their male customers pricking Abraham with sour suspicions. Still, they
adore their daughter, an agile feat of racial doublethink.
Sandra (played as a child by Ella Ramangwane) graduated from
her parents’ nuanced racism to the full-on hostility of her peers in grade
school. Teachers treat her as if she was invisible; students bully her only
friend; administrators whip her for imaginary infractions. Her parents tried to
defend her with a court case to change her classification. Changing the society
was unimaginable.
Sophie Okonedo (Oscar-nominated for her work in “Hotel
Rwanda”) plays Sandra as a teen and an older woman. She is jarringly
miscast as a schoolgirl, but brings hushed dignity to the part even in a
student uniform. She can cast a glance that whispers of distress.
Useful, because Sandra’s life was unspeakably hard. By her
teens she had absorbed so much hatred from whites that she identified with
blacks. She eloped with an African but couldn’t legally live with him, nor was
she allowed to change her racial designation and join him. Her racial
reinvention estranged her family, and she was denied even the respite of
anonymity, since the world press followed her colorful case for decades.
If this were fiction, Sandra would triumph, or at least
speak out against injustice with passionate insight. Life is not so tidy. Even
after apartheid, the legacy of Sandra’s confused identity frustrated her. The
filmmakers shift focus to South Africa’s first free elections in 1994 for
borrowed dramatic uplift.
“Skin” never probes as deeply as it should; it
never reaches the heart of a family that struggles against its own flesh and
blood.
Skin
2 1/2 stars
Starring: Sam Neill, Alice Krige, Ella Ramangwane, Sophie
Okonedo
Directed by: Anthony Fabian
Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some violence and
sexuality.
Colin Covert reviews movies for the Minneapolis Star
Tribune. Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
