A disease is a disease by any other name

Khomotso Manyaka (Chandra)

South African cinema seems to be going through a period of, well, good filmmaking. (I'm not including marginal releases that fall under the 'kommin Afrikaner' designation, as we'll never get rid of those.) After the highly entertaining and polished "Jerusalema" (Ziman 2008), here's the somber yet gentle story of a country ravaged by HIV/Aids: "Life, Above All" by Oliver Schmitz. Note the punctuation. This is the film that Schmitz, in spite of directing the seminal 1980s gangster drama "Mapantsula", could not initially get local funding for, and that eventually enjoyed a 10 minute standing ovation at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. (European backers financed the film until the local DTI kicked in. Which begs the question: to what an extent is "Life, Above All" a South African film? That's a discussion for another time.)

I suppose it's understandable that "Life, Above All" would have trouble obtaining financing, and also that it would be much loved at Cannes. Regarding the first matter, here's a film that condemns not merely the disease but the South African (and I use the term broadly) tendency to not talk about HIV/Aids; if you pretend that it doesn't exist, it might go away, or at least spare everyone the embarrassment of acknowledging that a loved one had died because of the disease. To what an extent did former president Mbeki help to create this view? Could it be that the film was seen as possibly too dangerous to fund locally, as if local financiers could not commit to the project on an ideological basis?

Regarding the latter matter: for all its severity, the film is never message-heavy (or heavy handed). Schmitz, working from Allan Stratton's novel, views the social effects of HIV/Aids through the eyes of young Chandra (Khomotso Manyaka), a  young girl who finds her life shaped by the disease and her community's approach to it from the opening shot. The film follows her attempts to salvage what she can of her collapsing family.

Like "The 400 Blows" (Truffaut 1959) and "Come and See" (Klimov 1985), the film's use of the child's perspective seems to make us more receptive to its themes, and speaking for myself, more open to its emotional appeal. While the child's view makes some events more palatable and plays more directly to emotions, you are still regularly reminded that you're viewing life through the eyes of someone who is not supposed to be dealing with what Chandra faces on a daily basis. The film has a stunning opening shot and suggests a contextual expectation for Chandra that, a few moments later, is utterly subverted. It's one of the most effective scenes in the whole film as Chandra's unfortunate position in her own family is brutally highlighted. How this single scene speaks to something very common in South Africa haunts the rest of the film as we are made to understand that Chandra is supposed to represent numerous nameless girls who find themselves in similar positions.

Chandra's journey is captivating as the film moves effortlessly from one event to the next, surely in no small part due to Manyaka's earnest presence. For most of its running time, the film works very well on technical and narrative levels. The film is not without potential pitfalls; I have not yet made up my mind about the exact lack of dimension that accompanies some secondary characters: the promiscuous friend; the drunk father; the uber-judgmental community members. While the film's ending works story-wise, it fails emotionally since the payoff requires us to buy into something specific that I for one was not entirely convinced of. After the relative harshness of everything that had come before, the ending felt like a let-down, a too-tidy, audience friendly packaging of the problem. The message is spelled out, not suggested. A neat finale is the last thing you need when you're dealing with children and HIV/Aids.