Life, above all

Cecil says: This is a South African film, made with German backing, which seemed a little odd, until I searched around the subject and discovered that the white South African director now lives in Germany.

It's about a young girl, just going into puberty, who has to take on the head of family role as her step-father descends into alcohol and drug abuse; her mother gets more and more sick as the film progresses; her baby step-sister dies; and her other step sister and brother need looking after.

The big, unspoken issue (at least until more than half way through the film) is AIDS. Are they or aren't they affected? It's a question that hangs over the people immediately involved, and it hangs in the air over the rest of the village, who speculate, jump to conclusions and take on almost vigilante-like stances in case the disease has hit their neighbourhood.

I don't normally read reviews before writing my own, and tonight as I read some of the professional reviewers' thoughts, I realised why. What is it about so-called professional reviewers that they feel they have to deconstruct a film, pull it apart, look at its weaknesses, and above all analyse it. Why is film review such an intellectual (or academic) exercise? Why can reviewers not tell us how they related to the film instead???

I found myself like an outside observer in this film. Was that because it was all about the black community in South Africa (not a single white actor, though that actually felt quite refreshing)? Was it the subtitles and a language I could not understand (and yet, I quite enjoyed the sound of this language and found the subtitles very readable)? Was it because the focus was on a 12-13 year old girl taking on responsibilities I could not relate to?

I actually don't know why I felt hardly any emotion or involvement in the characters (though I thought Chanda was brilliantly acted by a first time actress Khomotso Manyaka), though the storyline carried me through from start to finish.

Maybe it was because the main resonance in my own life story concerns something that happened before I was even born: my parents also lost a baby and struggled to deal with their grief for most of their lives afterwards; like the parents in Life Above All, they chose not to tell their other kids initially what had happened, but in our case with long-term emotional damage resulting from the very protective secrecy they had attempted to impose.

Actually, in the case of the family in this film, the fact that baby Sarah's death is kept from the two young kids leads them to continue to play with her in their fantasy games, with almost disastrous consequences. I didn't really take a message from all this, but it did strike me how enormously difficult infant death is to deal with for all family members, however they die.

I saw this film in the wonderfully-named Knickerbocker Cinema in Holland, Michigan, along with about 100 others. The cinema is now run by the local university, which is great, but I couldn't help wondering why more students were not present and why I was almost the youngest person in the audience...

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