REVIEW: Young Stars Carry Otherwise Flaccid Life, Above All

A small story is laid out in broad, biblical terms in Life, Above All, a ye-who-is-without-sin parable set in contemporary, AIDS-stricken South Africa. Director Oliver Schmitz takes great and often very photogenic pains to indict the shame and secrecy attached to the epidemic that has made South Africa the country with the highest incidence of HIV infections in the world.

The story is adapted from Canadian author Allan Stratton's 2004 novel, Chandra's Secret (Schmitz co-wrote the script with Dennis Foon), and follows a young girl's attempt to hide the illness in her family from overweening and superstitious neighbors. Within moments, the obvious injustice of her predicament is clear. What fails to emerge is a sufficient sense of the context within which the coldness and incivility of an otherwise intelligent, friendly community could be conceived of as completely human -- indeed as human as the righteousness of the film's heroine. Without it, the setting is of little consequence, and while I suspect that was the point, in straining to make this a borderless story of toxic prejudice, Schmitz lost sight of the specificity that could have made it more powerfully universal. With a situation this fraught and this complex, references to illiteracy and a belief in witchy healers don't cut it.

When the story begins, 12-year-old Chandra (Khomotso Manyaka) is selecting a coffin for her baby sister, an infant whose death is an open secret in the middle-class suburb where Chandra lives. Even Chandra's younger stepsiblings are uncertain of their sister's fate, and are repeatedly lied to about why their father -- a deadbeat and the village drunk -- and mother (Lerato Mvelase) grow thinner and more sickly by the day. The community runs on gossip and reputation management; one must maintain a pristine, healthful front in order not to rouse the tribal instinct to punish and purge. The name of the disease ravaging Chandra's family is not spoken until halfway through the film. Chandra's neighbor, Mrs. Tafa (Harriet Manamela), is an ally, but even she keeps denial close, like a talisman to be furiously waved at those who would confront her with the truth about her dead son and her ailing best friend. Only stoical Chandra is willing to face her mother's illness, and she makes intel-gathering trips to the hospital instead of attending school.

Chandra's best friend, Esther (Keaobaka Makanyane), has lost both of her parents to AIDS and is being treated as an outcast by her remaining family. Because she dresses in cheap clothes and refuses to hide, the neighborhood talk about her has turned dark. Prostitution rumors circulate, and Chandra is warned that Esther's reputation will stain her as well. Vicious gossip is positioned as a virus more pernicious than "the other thing." Even the doctors and the police have been infected, and there is no refuge for a girl like Esther. The scenes between the young actresses are the film's most compelling: Both first-timers, Manamela and Makanyane are possessed of extraordinary faces and plain attitudes. Schmitz leans on them -- rather than on acting -- to convey the girls' devoted but difficult bond over the course of tender but often highly charged encounters.

Less successful is the community dynamic that's ostensibly propelling the plot. The information firewall that Chandra, her mother, and Mrs. Tafa work to build around the home is challenged when the errant man of the house is dumped on their doorstop one afternoon. It's one of several instances in which the entire neighborhood magically appears in the street at the first sign of "trouble," just in time to witness a perceived misfortune and whisper significantly to each other. In the last such instance they form a bona fide mob. If it's true that many South Africans regard AIDS as a curse -- one that can be earned -- and are just an ambulance sighting away from picking up a rock and hurling it at their neighbor, Life, Above All owes it not just to us but to them to offer a more sophisticated rendering of how this situation -- and situations like it -- came to pass.

Schmitz wants to tell a bigger story than his film is built to contain, and at its worst Life, Above All does little more than drag its Job-like heroine through a poorly understood agony parade. A late scene of primal loyalty between mother and daughter is deeply affecting, but even this is tainted by a weakness for sentiment, a sudden turnaround tied in a moral bow. Only God Himself could pull off such a tidy ending, and as far as I know He retired after one breakout book.