"Precious" is the biggest imposition of the cinema year. No one who has seen this film about a 16-year-old HIV-positive abuse victim will ever forget it.
When she learns that she is positive, Precious looks dented for a moment. Only briefly do all the firewalls collapse in front of her soul before she straightens the cross and puts the self-protection systems back in place. In these seconds of total defencelessness, you can see straight into her soul. For one desperate sigh, you can contemplate the hundredfold abuse, all the beatings and the bottomless loneliness that the teenager normally hides behind a bulletproof façade of 150 kilos of live weight and endless silence. It is the decisive moment in her biography: she is at the bottom, it doesn't get any worse. If she can do this, she can do anything. From now on, the only way is up. 20 minutes into the film, she has left her abusive mother, swapped her illiterate status for a school-leaving certificate and, with her two children in her arms, is on her way to her future. Then the credits roll.
"Precious - Life is Precious" is the biggest imposition of the spring cinema season. And the biggest celebration. A film about the darkest sides of life, from which the audience leaves smiling. Not a feel-good film, but one about courage and defiance and the will to live that makes you smile through your tears.
The story: It's 1987, Precious is 16, pregnant for the second time by her stepfather who has abused her since she was 3 years old, weighs three hundredweight and can't read. Or as her chain-smoking mother says: "You're stupid and ugly. Nobody wants or needs someone like you. Get your fat arse to care."
Instead of resigning herself to her foreseeable fate, Precious begins to fight back, finds herself, learns from a lesbian teacher who she is, what she can do and that she is loved, makes friends and grows far beyond herself. This could be cheesy, but here it is staged so truthfully and realistically that it is credible and therefore deeply moving.
"Precious" is also a duel between two incredible actresses: Gabourey Sidibe was rightly nominated for an Oscar this year for her role as Precious in her feature film debut. The American comedienne Mo'Nique rightly won it because she turns Precious' mother Mary into a woman who wants to destroy her daughter because she has long been one: a big, scary, completely understandable monster.
The openly gay director Lee Daniels and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher manage to reconcile child abuse, HIV, domestic violence, eating disorders, the nightmarish conditions in the black welfare estates and Mariah Carey. The result is one of the definitive American social dramas in cinema history. No one who has seen "Precious" will forget it.
The fact that HIV is also portrayed here as the social catastrophe when the virus unexpectedly hit the coloured community in the USA in the mid-1980s is another merit of the film that should not be underestimated.
"Precious", to be seen in German cinemas from 26 March.
Paul Schulz
