It’s the kind of earnest-o-rama where the evil racists are either frigidly indifferent to the black experience or shrill, hissable monsters. Meanwhile the black characters are by and large nobly suffering.
If you didn’t know that Sandra Laing was a real person you’d swear Skin, the film about her life, was the work of someone like Günter Grass or Jerzy Kosinski—an absurdist with an axe to grind. To wit: Despite being born to two Afrikaners, Laing’s complexion and features were unmistakably black, the result of secret “kaffir” blood somewhere in the family tree. That her parents were pro-Apartheid, even after her birth, is a bitter twist even Rod Serling would have found too out-there.
It’s easy to imagine the mind-melting satire a visionary filmmaker could’ve made with this rich set-up. Instead, Laing got Anthony Fabian, who gives her biopic a sanctimonious, humorless Stanley Kramer spitshine, downplaying the themes so he can instead inform us that, in case you haven’t heard, Apartheid was very, very, very bad.
Introduced as a child (when she’s played by a sunny Ella Ramangwane), Laing is already the subject of ostricization and humiliations. This drives Daddy (Sam Neill) to become a principles-driven, successories-spouting paladin, fighting and raging to change the laws so that racial classification will derive from descent, not appearance. And he succeeds. Except that he’s done nothing for others affected by the horrors of Apartheid, and has also condemned his daughter (played from a teen on by the distractingly too-old Sophie Okonedo, who is 40) to a special kind of hell where she routinely turns off both races.
Skin’s only novel idea is the hero of the first act is the villain of the rest. Neill (and, to a lesser degree, wife/mother Alice Krige) is still a despicable racist, extolling his love for Laing while threatening her black boyfriend with gunfire. From here till the end, Laing flits between worlds, shacking up in a Swaziland shanty only to be expelled and left utterly rootless.
Every one of the tale’s many twists positively drips with irony, but Skin plays so flatly it’s possible director Fabian doesn’t even realize what irony is. It’s the kind of earnest-o-rama where the evil racists are either frigidly indifferent to the black experience or, in the case of Neill, shrill, hissable monsters. Meanwhile the black characters are by and large nobly suffering, including Okonedo, who wears a constant mask of bland inexpression.
That Skin is compelling anyway is a tribute entirely to the freak happenstance of Laing’s life, not any filmmaking prowess, of which there is none. C+
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