Skin

If Skin wasn’t based on a true story, it’s the kind of narrative that would be almost too hard to endure, let alone believe, so relentlessly cruel is it. As a metaphor for the shockingly warped mentality that presided over South Africa’s decades of Apartheid (and still indelibly lingers), the biography of Sandra Laing is hard to beat. A black-skinned child born in the 1950s to white Afrikaner parents, Sandra spent her youth, and much of her adult life it seems, being buffeted by successive rejections not only from official institutions and society at large, but by her family (her two siblings apparently refuse contact with her to this day) and, later, her husband.

First-time feature director Anthony Fabian aims for a straight-bat approach to Sandra’s story, which is certainly the strongest thing Skin has going for it. Sophie Okonedo does her best in a credulity-stretching role, grasping the baton from young Sandra, Ella Ramangwane, to play the lead from her exceptionally self-conscious, gawky teen years in the ’60s – which involve being legally ‘reclassified’ from white to black and back again – through to post-Apartheid South Africa’s first free elections in 1994.

Sam Neill is convincing as Sandra’s instinctively protective but culturally blinkered father, Abraham, enraged by constant disbelief (and spells of doubt in his own mind) regarding Sandra’s paternity; though the film’s stand-out performance belongs to Alice Kirge, whose conflicting pulls as Sandra’s mother and Abraham’s long-suffering wife are profoundly expressed.

The film is elegantly shot, particularly the muted sepia tones of Sandra’s early school years; the palette seems to drain everything of colour but conveys the scale from light to dark all too clearly. Stylish production design and costumes likewise point up the barbarism of the ‘civilised’ ruling class – no more so than when the young Sandra is made to stand in a refined, oak-panelled office in front of a crowd of neatly turned-out state bureaucrats, to endure having pencils stuck in her hair and her teeth examined to determine her race. While such visual texture evokes Sandra’s childhood environment convincingly, the melodramatic, mediocre score runs roughshod over such subtleties and highlights how fundamentally conventionalised Skin is.

Sophie Ivan

Anticipation:

Solid cast, incredible story, with a handful of festival awards to boot.

Enjoyment:

It feels like sitting through an above-par misery memoir adaptation, which is, um, basically what it is.

In Retrospect:

Extraordinary subject, given a prosaic treatment.