1. T
Tsotsi
Production year: 2005
Country: Rest of the world
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 94 mins
Directors: Gavin Hood
Cast: Israel Makoe, Mothusi Magano, Nambitha Mpumlwana, Presley
Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto
Tsotsi won this year's best foreign film Oscar, an award that traditionally goes to pretty safe
and undemanding material, and despite the ostensibly edgy nature of the subject matter, this
was really no exception. Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood, is an earnest film about the South
African shantytowns, and it is at some pains to show that its heart is in the right place - that is,
right up on its sleeve. It is taken from an Athol Fugard novel first published in 1980, very
much the era of apartheid, and it is a pretty grim measure of how little things have changed,
in that the story can be transplanted to the modern age by making a duo of cops consist of
one white and one black, by making some of the wealthy folks in the gated communities
black, and by implying that the township is now not a politically prescribed ghetto, but a tough,
American-style urban "hood".
"Tsotsi" means criminal or gangster, and Presley Chweneyagae plays a brash young
tearaway who has forgotten his own name and now answers to nothing but Tsotsi. He is the
leader of a three other criminals: Boston (Mothusi Magano), Butcher (Zenzo Ngqobe) and
Aap (Kenneth Nkosi). He meets up with his dangerous crew most nights at the local shebeen,
where there is plenty to drink and smoke and where they plan their next criminal spree.
What this means is generally hanging around at the train station, looking around for anyone
foolhardy enough to show that they have a wallet-full of cash. Then the gang follows their
target on to a crowded train, and threaten him with a blade; Hood has a very tense sequence
showing how Tsotsi and the gang can actually rob and kill someone entirely noiselessly in the
dense mass of commuting workers and leave without anyone realising what has happened.
But the most lucrative crime is carjacking. Tsotsi crouches behind a tree as a luxury saloon
pulls up to its security gates in an upscale part of Johannesburg - but fatally, the remote
control for opening these gates fails to work. The driver has to leave her vehicle to speak
through the intercom, giving Tsotsi a window of opportunity. He brandishes a gun, shoots the
woman, gets in the car and drives off - and is many miles away before he realises that there
is a baby in the back. For reasons he can't fathom, Tsotsi keeps the baby in his own squalid
room, as clueless about how to look after it as any other young male, law-abiding or not. And
the baby awakens in him memories of his own childhood and his mother, which he has
determinedly repressed.
The story of how this baby changes Tsotsi unfolds in tandem with what looks like the
psychological endgame of his criminal career. He has been driven by fear and need, factors
that this baby exposes in him more clearly, and a neurotic need to control, and to pre-empt
violence with violence, which has inevitably meant that he has been looking at his own gang
members as potential victims. They are to be picked on in order to instil fear in the rest, and
to head off potential insurrection, and he has already delivered a terrifying beating to Boston.
But the baby stops Tsotsi's violence, not due to some sugary "miracle", but rather because it
is an overwhelming distraction. When he orders a young mother, at gunpoint, to breastfeed
his new possession it is a spectacle for which his criminal career has not prepared him.
Tsotsi is a positive movie, with a message of redemption, and has a decent faith that the
shanty towns of South Africa are not simply places of despair, but communities where poverty
does not rule out the possibility of doing the right thing. The narrative line towards this happy
ending is perhaps a little straight and leaves you with a sense that real life would be a little
more messy. None the less, this is a gutsy and heartfelt story.
Source: The Guardian, Friday 17 March 2006 – By Paul Bradshaw