Love is (Not Color) Blind
by Paula Nechak
SPG Film Critic
Based on the true life story of a South African woman named Sandra Laing, "Skin" chronicles her plight as the black-skinned daughter of white parents during Apartheid.
Opening during the first free elections of 1994 in Johannesburg, "Skin" quickly transposes back to 1965 when Sandra—along with her white-skinned brother, Leon—enters an Eastern-Transvaal school. Her skin color elicits stares and whispers as she, dressed exactly as the other students in school uniform, ambles down the corridor lugging her suitcase. Sandra asks her mother, Sannie (South African-born actress Alice Krige), "Ma, why are they all staring?" Her mother replies soothingly, "You're new here, my sweet."
That blind devotion becomes the blessing and curse of Sandra's life as she struggles with racism, curiosity, shame and insidious bias from not only the white community, but her own blood, especially her strict father, Abraham (Sam Neill). Abraham's simmering anger and mistrust over how he may have come to parent a black-skinned daughter permeates his every thought, and oozes into his relationship with his wife, with whom he has rehashed Sandra's color in some depth in an implied backstory, as well as the black customers who frequent his outback country store.
Abraham, learning about polygenic inheritance is anguished at the idea that there may be black blood in his, or Sannie’s, veins, and insists that he and his wife have “never been unfaithful and if there is black blood in our veins we never knew about it.” It is a wail of despair for Abraham, which, in effect causes him to exert tighter control over his daughter. When, as a teenager (Sandra is now played by the always compelling Sophie Okonedo) she is declared white under the reclassification law, her parents urge her to date white boys, who view her with the same disrespect, diffidence and sometimes violence, they exhibit toward black girls. More than once she returns home bruised from fighting off her date.
Viewing the white world as hostile and cold she becomes attracted to Petrus, a black store-owner who has a shop in the Prefontaine ghetto. After being caught sneaking home from a date with Petrus, she is exiled from her family, and pregnant, moves in with Petrus and his mother, asking the board to reclassify her as black.
“Skin” is probably a more harrowing personal journey than conveyed on film, nevertheless it's doubly sad for the familial betrayals that occur. Writer and director Anthony Fabian relays Sandra’s story, adapted from her book, "When She Was White," in the most elemental terms, relying upon his fine cast to flesh out the basic plot points and fill the moments in between with emotion and conviction, and if there is nothing extraordinary about the way he chooses to tell Sandra’s life, the events that compose it need no additional orchestration or cinematic exaggeration.
In its quiet, methodical way “Skin” is as caustically pointed as the bleaches Sandra, as a child, pours upon her skin in order to lighten it to be like the other white children. That she endures mistrust and abandonment from both factions of the societies she straddles makes for an emptiness that is difficult to convey. But Okonedo, with her intelligent gaze, spells out Sandra’s predicament with blazing clarity.
At one point Sandra pours water that literally contains her blood, into the small garden she has managed to tend, and we realize she is as much a part of South Africa as it is her, and that the dualities of color, culture, society and family that both segregate and integrate her have made her fiercely strong. She stubbornly refuses to be a victim, something the film honors passionately. Fabian’s filmmaking may be conventional, but his primary color rendering only enhances the more complex tertiary color terrain that Sandra Laing’s story traverses.
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