my movie review on Tsotsi
from south africa
let me say you something about a beautiful cinema, TSOTSI….
Director – Gavin Hood
Writers – Athol Fugard, Gavin Hood
Director of Photography
LANCE GEWER
Edited by
MEGAN GILL
Tsotsi is gorgeous, exciting, touching, and thrilling. Not only is it a first-rate piece of storytelling, but it also takes the viewer into a world of South African poverty and crime that he has never seen before. Director/writer Gavin Hood offers us a tale of tragic redemption and uncommon poetry in a subculture of the most hopeless immorality. Truly unforgettable.
The only work in recent times to which this movie can be compared is City of God. There, too, the viewer is brought into a world of poverty and crime he probably never knew existed. It is a world so bleak that it forces the viewer to examine his own morality and wonder how much of the civility he takes for granted in his life is merely the luxury of the well fed and comfortable. These characters live on the edge and their primary passion is survival.
Tsotsi literally means “thug” or “gangster” in the street language of South Africa’s townships
Orphaned at an early age and compelled to claw his way to adulthood alone, Tsotsi has lived a life of extreme social and psychological deprivation. A undomesticated being with scant regard for the feelings of others, he has hardened himself against any feelings of compassion. Ruled only by impulse and instinct, he is fueled by the fear he instills in others. With no name, no past and no plan for the future, he exists only in an angry present. Tsotsi heads up his own gang of social misfits, Boston, a failed teacher (Mothusi Magano), Butcher, a cold-blooded assassin (Zenzo Ngqobe) and Aap, a dim-witted heavy (Kenneth Nkosi.)
One night, during an alcohol-fueled evening at a local shebeen (illicit liquor bar) Tsotsi is put under pressure by a drunken Boston to reveal something of his past; or at the very least, his real name. But Tsotsi reveals nothing. The questions evoke painful, long repressed memories that Tsotsi would prefer to keep buried. Still, Boston keeps asking. The other gang members sense a rising anger in Tsotsi and try to stop the interrogation, but Boston keeps pushing, prodding, digging. Suddenly, Tsotsi lashes out with his fists and beats Boston’s face to a pulp. The violence is brief but extreme.
Tsotsi turns and flees into the night. He runs wildly, desperate to escape the pain of unwelcome images rising in his mind. By the time he stops running he has crossed from the shantytown into the more affluent suburbs of the city. He collapses under a tree. It is raining hard. A woman in a driveway is struggling to open her motorized gate with a faulty electronic remote. Tsotsi draws his gun. It’s an easy opportunity for an unprepared car jacking. He shoots at the woman and as he races away in the woman’s silver BMW, he hears the cry of a child. There’s a 3 month old baby in the back of the car. Tsotsi loses control of the vehicle and crashes to a stop on the verge of a deserted road. The car is a write-off.
Tsotsi staggers from the vehicle. The baby is screaming. Tsotsi walks away. Then he turns back. The baby calms slightly when Tsotsi looks at it. This unsettles him. He hesitates. An unfamiliar feeling stirs within him: an impulse other than his pure instinct for personal survival. Suddenly, he gathers up the infant, shoves it into a large shopping bag and heads for the shantytown on foot. Tsotsi does not reveal to anyone that he has the child. He hides it from his gang. At first he thinks he can care for it alone. Keep it in his shack. Feed it on condensed milk. But he soon realizes that he cannot cope. The baby screams constantly and his attempts to feed it fail miserably.
At the community water tap, Tsotsi selects a young woman with a baby of her own and secretly follows her back to her home. Forcing his way in behind her, he makes the terrified woman breastfeed “his” baby at gunpoint.
The young mother, Miriam (Terry Pheto), is only a few years older than Tsotsi. She has recently lost her husband to violent crime and lives alone with her baby, making ends meet as a seamstress. At first Miriam is very frightened by Tsotsi. But gradually she takes on the role of both mother to the baby and mentor to the desensitized young gangster. As their relationship tentatively progresses, Tsotsi is compelled to confront his own violent nature and to reveal his past.
What makes Tsotsi, in the end, a finer film than City of God is that it offers a more complex sense of hope; it reminds us in an honest and unsentimental way that inside even the hardest cases there is a soul, which is never beyond redemption
The film is a psychological thriller in which the protagonist is compelled to confront his own brutal nature and face the consequences of his actions. It puts a human face on both the victims and the perpetrators of violent crime and is ultimately a story of hope and a triumph of love over rage.
One of the greatest achievements of this movie is it won the best film award for OSCAR 2006 in the foreign language category.
* i hope keralites also saw this movie in malayalam!!!!!!!!
If, Lal Jose directed movie “mulla” makes you attracted, thank Gavin Hood for the orginal picture.
gopucreator 