Marked
Netflix
★★★★☆

THE Netflix series Marked begins with a bang, an armored car robbery from the point of view of the female driver Babalwa, who eludes the robbers amidst a hail of gunfire. The series, after its Netflix mandated 15-minute opening to grab the audience, is all uphill from there until the last few minutes when it manages to betray its genre, its lead character and all of its mostly progressive political leanings.

The series has an acute sense of rich and poor in Johannesburg. Babalwa’s daughter will die of cancer because her mother, and her ineffectual church-deacon father, cannot afford the 1.2 million required for the operation, with hospital fees being piled on as well as 100,000 for the anaesthesiologist.

The besieged mother goes to the local gangster Baba G for help and, looking out over the ruins, he laments that in the ghetto of Soweto they eat cabbage while in the affluent sections of the city “they eat caviar.”

Babalwa (Lereto Mvelase who voiced the character in both Zulu and English versions) and her husband are devout Christians, but when they go to their pastor to ask for money and a fundraising campaign he refuses, telling them to “just have faith.”

She then goes to her boss at a company appropriately named Iron Heart and asks him to loan her the money, gesturing around his lavish office and shouting angrily that “Every day I put my life on the line for you so you can live like this.” She is surrounded by money-grubbing upper-level employees at the company, one of whom, when she realises that Babalwa may be planning a heist, immediately blackmails her for a percentage.

The female driver proves her resourcefulness and ingenuity in a number of areas, teaming up with the bastard son of the original gangster after he is killed, recruiting church congregants as her gang, including an in-debt shopaholic with a penchant for new clothes, and ingeniously not allowing her armoured car partner to take the blame for the robbery.

Finally, she decides that she will leave her do-nothing husband for her more understanding partner, telling the pious husband: “I’ve been righteous all my life and what has it gotten me?”

There has been a shift in the heist film of late. In earlier instances the thieves all die tragically or land in jail (The Asphalt Jungle, Rififi, The Lavendar Hill Mob), but in more contemporary moments, two of which feature equally down-on-their luck African-American female thieves (Set It Off and Steve McQueen’s Widows), as well as the popular Netflix series Money Heist, one or several of the thieves gets away with the loot.

As times are harder and inequality worsens, these iterations of the genre suggest the audience is more interested in cheering on those who would rob the rich than in going along with the old adage that “Crime does not pay.”

Unfortunately, in the end, Marked sells out both its resolute African female lead and its audience. By the merest sleight of hand — a moment of whimsy when one character has a complete makeover that is completely out of character, an intervention less divine than deux ex machina — the series in its final moments reverses its polarity and presents an act of faith that makes its heroine appear to be not independent and able to risk anything to save her child, but rather bereft of faith, as a conservative Biblical reading would have it. The ending brands her as having crossed a mercenary line and going too far, even if her goal was to save the life of her daughter, threatened as much by a high-priced medical system as by the cancer which is destroying her body.

There are some commercial explanations both for the overtly political thrust of most of the series as well as the conservative ending. Netflix is no longer — if it ever was — in the business of (as its former CEO declared) speaking “truth to power,” but rather boasts series after series whose content instead is “pure entertainment.” For every Marked, there are five Wednesday’s, the streaming service’s Adams Family teen exploitation series.

However, Africa has the fewest Netflix subscribers of any continent and on that continent the streamer has a serious rival, Showmax, which, though partly owned by right-wing Comcast’s NBC Universal, still features local content that is of necessity grounded in its place, perhaps forcing Netflix, in a big-budget series such as Marked that is designed to bring in new subscribers, to, as they say, “keep it real.”

On the other hand, in what is otherwise a stellar teleplay which moves the genre forward, thanks in part by the Zimbabwean writer Sydney Dire, the South African actress Wendy Gumede and Charleen Ntsane, the ending may be either a capitulation to a streaming service nervous about offending religious viewers, or a capitulation by the creators and the streaming service to local censorship.

Fortunately, the final fifth of the last episode does not cancel out what is otherwise an extraordinary seven and four-fifths of an action series. The heroine of Marked takes her place alongside other heist heroines, substituting the care and compassion of the classic protagonist of the maternal melodrama (from Stella Dallas to All About My Mother) for the more predictable profit-oriented motive, and all as a result of her own downtrodden social circumstances, yet always placing the needs of her child first.

Marked is on Netflix now