Miami Herald - November 28, 2005
Glenn Garvin, ggarvin@herald.com

The young woman, seeking relief from a persistent, racking cough, is surprised when the medicine woman in her Zulu village tells her it's brought on by anger. "I have no anger," says the perplexed young woman. Soon enough, she will. Her life is about to be cut short by the AIDS epidemic sweeping South Africa.

Yesterday, which debuts tonight on HBO, manages the near-impossible: Nearly a quarter-century after the disease was first reported in the United States, this drama manages to put a new face on AIDS.

Made by two veteran South African anti-apartheid filmmakers, Yesterday changes not only continents but settings, moving from the familiar urban environments with which most of us associate the disease to the desolate villages of South Africa's Zulu region.

It is sub-Saharan African villages like this one that are the new frontier of the disease. Hundreds of thousands of Africans die there each year, shunned by friends and family and with little or no medical care.

But Yesterday is no polemic. Spare and sere as the arid landscape in which it takes place, it follows a year -- the final one, probably -- in the life of a 30ish Zulu woman named Yesterday as she learns of her infection and struggles to survive until her daughter is old enough to enter school.

Her medical problems are, in many ways, the least of it. The rest of the village wants to drive her away when they learn she has AIDS. Her husband -- though he's the source of the infection -- beats her savagely, then begs forgiveness as the disease chews up his own body.

The husband is one of the very few male characters to make more than a fleeting appearance in Yesterday. In the film, as in real life, men are mostly absent from rural South Africa. They leave their villages to work for months at a stretch in distant mines, while their wives stay behind to mind the children and supplement the family income from small vegetable patches. Yesterday is very much a story of an all-female society in which men are worse than useless: As one of the women notes with bitter laughter, sometimes it seems all the men do is show up once in a while to spread the diseases they've picked up in the city.

Reduced to paper and ink, Yesterday sounds bleak and lifeless, and without Leleti Khumalo, who plays the title character, it might well have been. Khumalo, the only member of the all-South African cast likely familiar to Americans (she was nominated for a best-actress Tony for her Broadway performance in Sarafina!), projects a kind of luminous stoicism as the doomed young woman. Even amid the ravages of the final stages of the disease, her smile lights up the screen.

Virtually every word of dialogue in Yesterday is spoken in subtitled Zulu, but the lean script makes it barely noticeable. If anything, the film's silences speak louder than its words. It is full of unanswered and unanswerable questions, from the plaintive query of Yesterday's daughter (why aren't I a bird?) to to the unfathomable one Yesterday herself asks of her doctor: "Am I going to stop living?"

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Herald television critic Glenn Garvin will answer your TV questions online. Go to Herald.com and click on Q&A Forum.

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