White to Colored and Back Again in Apartheid’s Maze

Caros,

Saiu ontem no New York Times a crítica de um filme chamado Skin, que conta a estória de uma mulher da África do Sul que teve a sua raça várias vezes reclassificada pelo regime de apartheid por causa da cor de sua pele e da textura de seu cabelo. O artigo está transcrito abaixo.

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Se o Estatuto da Igualdade Racial progredir no Brasil, não será impossível que venhamos a desembocar em um cenário distópico semelhante por aqui. Certamente alguns vestibulandos já estão vivendo esse pesadelo, especialmente na UnB, com o tenebroso Tribunal da Classificação Racial.

Vale a pena tentar assistir ao filme quando chegar ao Brasil.

October 30, 2009

White to Colored and Back Again in Apartheid’s Maze

By MANOHLA DARGIS

“Skin” is a fictionalized retelling of the true and terrible story of Sandra Laing, a South African woman whose race was classified and reclassified by the government, then in the mad grip of apartheid. Born in 1955 to officially white parents, Ms. Laing — played by an uncharacteristically unsteady Sophie Okonedo — was judged white. But when the child entered the larger world, her darker skin, and especially her tightly curled black hair, marked her as different.

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At 10, she was dragged out of school by the police because the principal had decided she wasn’t white. The government agreed and relabeled her “colored.” Much of the film unfolds in a lengthy flashback that opens in the mid-1960s, when the young Sandra (played by Ella Ramangwane) is still living in her rural home with her parents and older brother, Leon (Hannes Brummer). Her father, Abraham (Sam Neill, wound too tight), and mother, Sannie (an effective Alice Krige), run a grocery store for blacks. A passionate supporter of the government and its policies, Abraham insists that his black customers put their money on the counter, presumably to avoid physical contact. Sannie seems more tolerant, though she’s under the patriarchal heel. They’re loving parents, demonstrably fond of their children, whose physical differences (Leon has a lighter complexion) they don’t appear to acknowledge or even see until after they drop Sandra off at an all-white boarding school.

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It’s as if they had dropped a bomb at the school — and into their own lives — rather than a child. A chain of grotesque events ensues, each seemingly more improbable than the next, though often drawn from Ms. Laing’s life. Sandra, who had grown up believing she was white, becomes a pariah, forced out of school, then out of her presumed race and finally her home. Shunned by whites, she melts into the segregated shantytowns, having taken up with a vegetable seller, Petrus (Tony Kgoroge, delivering the best performance in the film), whose smile grows dim. Heartache follows heartache as Sandra, who had been reclassified as white after a court trial, later tries to have herself racially recategorized so she can keep her family with Petrus intact.

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Ms. Laing’s story has been told previously, before and after the abolition of apartheid, in various newspaper reports, a documentary and the recent biography “When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race.” It’s no wonder: it’s an emblematic tale of a woman whose body became a kind of tablet on which racist laws were inscribed. Her skin, her nose, her lips were all scrutinized. At one point in “Skin,” a man sticks a pencil into the young Sandra’s short hair, a re-creation of the “pencil test” used by some government boards to judge race. If the pencil stayed in, the person was deemed black.

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Written by Helen Crawley, Jessie Keyt and Helena Kriel, and directed by Anthony Fabian (who also has a credit for the screen story), “Skin” is sincere and well meaning and tries very, very hard to wring your tears. What a mistake! Crying at the movies can be one of the pleasures in life, like sobbing over a book that has delivered a dagger right to the heart. But Ms. Laing’s story is a tragedy, not a melodrama, and it doesn’t need to be goosed — nor do we. We don’t need overwrought performances to understand the calamity of her life or to weep when her parents turn their backs on her. If anything, the story demands restraint because, invariably at the movies, it’s the gentle touch that hits harder.

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Alas, Mr. Fabian, directing his first feature-length fiction film, uses a club whenever a feather would do. He also mishandles the actors, in particular Mr. Neill and Ms. Okonedo, both of whom have been incomparably better elsewhere. As the heavy, Mr. Neill tends to turn the volume up far too loud, so you can really hear the script’s weaknesses. The usually charismatic Ms. Okonedo, in turn, shoulders hunched and eyes often downcast, gives a performance so recessive she almost slips off the screen. She might make you tear up. But if you want an honest cry, stay for the final credits to watch some footage of the real Ms. Laing as a child, happily and innocently tucked in the embrace of the family that betrayed her.

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Fonte: daqui.

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