The New York Times - November 28, 2005
Alessandra Stanley

"Yesterday" is proof that even the saddest stories can be told simply, with intelligence and grace and without falling into mawkish bathos. It also happens to be beautifully made. The story rolls out like the endless dirt road that awaits its heroine on her circular trek between village and clinic. The vast African sky fills the screen, ending in the sculptured mountainscape of a remote horizon across the veld. The numinous beauty of that timeless, empty Eden is marred by only one thing: a string of rusty, sharp-toothed barbed wire that constricts the people within.

Leleti Khumalo, a South African actress who was the star of the play and movie "Sarafina!," portrays Yesterday. The heroine's name is also the film's mournful leitmotif. When a doctor expresses surprise, saying she has known people named Today and Tomorrow, but not Yesterday, her patient shyly explains that her father named her that because he felt that "things were better yesterday than they are today." Yesterday chose to call her own daughter Beauty (Lihle Mvelase), but she herself is all too well named: a woman who, under a death sentence of H.I.V., is vanishing into memory.

"Yesterday" delivers a powerful message about AIDS in Africa, but it also serves as a signpost in the ascendance of television over movies. Hollywood keeps hedging its big-budget bets on movies aimed at the young and incurious, so serious films are increasingly rare and ever more simplistic. It takes a George Clooney to make a political movie like "Good Night, and Good Luck" or "Syriana," and even those films are smugly patronizing, tugging at easy sentiment rather than at complicated thought. There is so little box-office appeal for most foreign films that it takes a subject as immediate and terrifying as suicide bombers, the Palestinian protaganists of Hany Abu-Assad's Arabic-language thriller "Paradise Now," to find an audience.

Meanwhile, cable networks like the Sundance Channel, Showtime and HBO are much less beholden to ratings or box-office returns, and have a growing appetite for the small, unusual movie that otherwise might never be seen by American audiences.

"Yesterday" provides a small, unusual look at the global tragedy of H.I.V. and other diseases ravaging Africa and other parts of the third world. The seemingly inexorable spread of malaria, tuberculosis and H.I.V. ebbs and flows as a remote, unimaginable calamity in newspaper headlines, benefit concerts and United Nations conferences. More than a million South Africans have died of AIDS, while experts say that as many as five million of them are infected with H.I.V., and women are now about three times more likely than men to become infected. Only a tiny fraction of those receive antiretroviral medication.

The film, which was partly sponsored by Nelson Mandela and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, focuses not on the statistics of millions but on the tragedy of one death.

Race and postcolonialism are not in the picture. There is only one white character in the film, a kind and empathetic female doctor (Camilla Walker) who speaks to her patients in fluent Zulu. Yesterday's story is played out on a continent that is darkened by the cloud of AIDS, not apartheid.

Yesterday and Beauty live in a small farming village populated almost entirely by women. Her husband, John Khumalo (Kenneth Kambule), like the other men, works far away in a mine near Johannesburg, and visits his family less than once a month. Yesterday and the other women eke out a stone-age subsistence while upholding a high civility of ritual greetings and hospitality. "Would you like tea?" Yesterday asks the teacher (Harriet Lehabe), a newcomer whom she befriended on one of her long walks to the clinic. "If it is no trouble," the teacher says gravely. "No trouble at all," Yesterday replies as she ushers her into her hut, which has no running water or electricity.

Courtesy dies in the brushfire of fear and rage that engulfs the village when Yesterday's infected husband returns home too sick to work. Yesterday is shunned, and the villagers force her to take her wasting husband away. Already ill herself and unable to find a bed for him in the local hospital, she builds a makeshift, one-man hospice by hand out of metal scraps and corrugated tin in a far-off field. She gives John a dignified death, while clinging to life long enough to see her daughter begin her first day of school.

"Yesterday" is not easy to watch, but it is almost impossible to turn off.

Yesterday

HBO, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Written and directed by Darrell James Roodt; Sudhir Pragjee and Sanjeev Singh, executive producers. Produced by Anant Singh and Helena Spring.

WITH: Leleti Khumalo (Yesterday), Lihle Mvelase (Beauty), Kenneth Kambule (John Khumalo), Harriet Lehabe (teacher), Camilla Walker (doctor), Mmoni Moabi (second teacher), Nandi Nyembe (Village Sangoma, or healer).

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