Based on South African playwright Athol Fugard’s novel, Tsotsi has been given an update by director and screenplay writer Gavin Hood. While the novel was published in 1960, when apartheid was tearing apart the country, the movie version is set in modern-day, post-apartheid South Africa. Race may not be the pressing issue now, but a huge divide still exists—among the haves and the have-nots. The Soweto townships are still mired in abject poverty, and disease (especially AIDS) has resulted in orphaned and abandoned children who must somehow survive in atrocious conditions on nothing but their wits.

We meet our protagonist—a baby-faced 19-year-old gang leader, known to all as Tsotsi, a generic term for ‘thug’, as he and his associates carry out a crime that suddenly turns vicious. Boston, the one member of the gang who appears sickened by what happened, confronts Tsotsi, demanding to know if he has any sense of decency left, and wondering aloud what Tsotsi’s real name is. All this time, we see the storm building in Tsotsi’s eyes, until he lashes out at Boston, beating him up brutishly.

Then he flees, and we hear the pounding beat of Kwaito music (South Africa’s answer to hip hop), its raw energy a counterpoint to Tsotsi’s panic and despair, and we’re treated to flashbacks of Tsotsi’s childhood, where we learn what has made him the seemingly emotionless creature he has become.

But before the audience can draw breath, Tsotsi gets sucked deeper into the tangled snarl of violent crime when a carjacking turns bad and he shoots the woman driver at point-blank range. He escapes in the car, driving like a madman, until an infant’s cry from the backseat brings him to the horrendous realization that he’s shot a mother and has practically abducted her baby. His first reaction is to loot the car and abandon the baby, but something makes him go back and take the infant with him.

He soon realizes that his criminal lifestyle is not conducive to taking care of an infant, so he holds up a young mother at knifepoint and forces her to feed the baby he claims to be his own. This young woman, a widowed mom taking care of a baby of her own, ekeing out a living selling tea and the occasional hand-crafted windchime, pleads with him to leave the baby with her, but he refuses at first. Instead, he burgles the baby’s father’s house in a sharply-contrasted, affluent neighbourhood. This leads to an intense meeting with the baby’s father, and a burglary that goes spectacularly and disastrously wrong.

What follows then is Tsotsi’s journey to an unlikely redemption, and we’re left to marvel at the fundamental change that can be wrought within a hardened criminal’s psyche by a dim sense of hope (lit by the knowing, understanding, and principled young woman) and a last-ditch attempt at decency, by simply doing the right thing.

Hood makes his statements with subtle precision, as when a shot has both the sprawling ghettoes and the resplendent skyline of Johannesburg within the same frame. As a director, he managed to coax stellar performances out of his cast, most notably young Presley Chweneyagae giving a tightly-reined performance as Tsotsi and Israel Makoe giving a stunning, intense portrayal of a man whose child’s life is at stake. I especially liked the wonderfully natural performance of Kenneth Nkosi as the easy-going Aap and, most of all, the delicately-nuanced performance of the luminous Terry Pheto as Miriam. Considering the fact that many cast members are in fact newcomers to the screen, it is quite amazing that director Gavin Hood has managed to put together such a talented ensemble cast and coax such stellar performances from each of them.

The soundtrack pounds with the raw energy of Kwaito music. Contributors include several Kwaito musicians, with Bonginkosi Dlamini, more commonly known as Zola, being the most well-known. Zola is a poet, actor and musician who grew up in Soweto, in the ghetto called Zola. He has this to say about the children of the ghettoes: “Kwaito kids are made from hunger, abuse, no father, violence & guns. Now, as adults, we must change the game for the better. Now we must change everything we are made from.”

This is not a movie that would appeal to everyone. It’s not so much the violence— there are violent incidents, but they are depicted in almost understated manner, with no excess of gore or drama, as if they were (and indeed, they may well be) part of everyday life. If anything, I find the scenes of the baby being neglected or ill-taken care of much more disturbing, as well as one flashback scene in which I can only hope that the dog involved was a very talented dog acting his heart out.

Tsotsi may not even be the movie that should have won the Best Foreign Film Award (my vote for that goes to Paradise Now), but it’s certainly a very well-made film that tells an important story in a painfully honest manner—a ‘no excuses, no apologies, just the facts, ma’am’ kind of story-telling that makes you wonder if somewhere out there in the ghetto townships, there is a young boy with no name whose journey mirrors that of Tsotsi’s.

In his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards where Tsotsi won the Best Foreign Film, director Gavin Hood said, ‘We may have foreign language films, but our stories are the same as your stories. They're about the human heart and emotion.’

Tsotsi is a journey into the heart and mind of a troubled young man whose circumstances made him a vicious thug, but who, through the intervention of fate, shows that he is not beyond redemption. Like all good movies, it’s a thoughtful exploration of the human condition. May there be many more to come from South Africa. As Gavin Hood said in his acceptance speech: ‘Viva Africa!’




Recommended: Yes