Movies about AIDS - or about any 'big issue,' really - run a serious risk of becoming pamphlets supporting an agenda. When tackling these issues, its easy to do it at the expense of human drama. 'Yesterday' avoids this trap by inverting it completely. It is a film about AIDS that only mentions the disease by name once. We see only two infected people, and the politics involved are scarcely even hinted at. This is a film about people first, foremost, and finally.
Leleti Khumalo stars as Yesterday, in a performance that relies almost entirely on facial expression. Khumalo uses hers to great effect - only the blackest of hearts wouldn't be won over by her within the first ten minutes of the film and moved to tears during the last ten. The supporting cast is nearly equally impressive, especially the very young Lihle Mvelase as Beauty.
Filmed in South Africa and performed in Zulu, 'Yesterday' looks and sounds like few other films. It is easy to enjoy the first quarter of the film simply as a sightseer. The landscapes are positively beautiful and the way of life is far removed enough from our own to be interesting no matter what is taking place on screen. As time progresses and our heroine Yesterday grows severely ill, the story becomes interesting more and more because of its universality. Even as the landscapes grow in beauty, it is the characters we want to see.
Some will certainly argue that more could have been done with the premise of this film. With AIDS ravaging Africa, is it right to tell such a small story? Surely there's room in the film for it - at times 'Yesterday' moves almost maddeningly slowly, and there isn't a subplot in sight. It would come as no surprise if the dialogue added up to no more then twenty pages of script. Writer/Director Darrell Roodt has obviously decided that less is more in this case, and the results speak for themselves. 'Yesterday' is finally and emphatically not about AIDS; it is about a woman with AIDS and her struggle to change the tide, to make tomorrow better than today.
YES (8/10)
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