Tsotsi

A Jo'burg resident myself it was great to see Jo'burg on screen in one hot film. I mean to often I get excited by seeing the Jo'burg skyline on the big screen and then I am sadly disappointed by the following weak film, not in this case. A great film with a great cast and great direction. Yes there are similarities to "City of God" but the story is much smaller and hence more personal; maybe it's because I live in Johannesburg but I found myself so emotionally caught up in the film that more then once I had to hold back tears.

Maybe there were some obvious uses of cinematic dramatic vices, yet the film held together all the way to the end and packed a serious punch. The lead actor was brilliant in his role which teetered between the victim and the aggressor constantly and consequently good and evil. A great cameo performance by Presley Chweneyagae. As a near graduate of South African film school this gives me hope for the cinematic future of our country.

In Johannesburg, the small time criminal Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae) is a teenager without feelings, hardened by his tough life. After killing a man with his gang in a robbery; hitting the gangster Boston of his gang; humiliating a crippled beggar along one night, Tsotsi hijacks a car and under the despair of a woman, he shots her in the stomach. While driving the car, Tsotsi finds that there is a baby on the back seat and the woman was a desperate mother. He brings the baby to his house in the slum and becomes attached to him. For six days, the baby changes his behavior, arousing and developing the sense of empathy and humanity in the cold blood killer.

"Tsotsi" is a touching, realistic and powerful story of redemption without being corny. Presley Chweneyagae is amazing in the role of a teenager without any feelings or respect for other human beings, with eyes without expression, and deserved a nomination to the Oscar. His behavior changes when he decides to take care of a baby that he accidentally kidnapped. I was impressed with the ghettos of poverty in Johannesburg, which are very similar to the slums in Rio de Janeiro. They are so distant and also so close, in a very sad reality of third world countries. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "Infância Roubada" ("Stolen Childhood")

Normally, I am reluctant to slam another person's comments about a film, but I have to take issue with Noel-74. First of all, the arrogance of comments like, "You've got to be a complete idiot to believe you're seeing something new" takes me back to the self-important little twerps of my undergraduate days. So, Noel-74, if you are an undergraduate, my apologies. Let's hope it's just a stage you're working through. If you're over the of 25, please stay clear. I mean, seriously, your comment that there was something sinister in making abject poverty look so beautiful. Can any person look at the scenes depicted in that movie and feel anything other than horror at the conditions in which so many of our brothers and sisters live? Not to get all touchy-feely on you, but if you came away from that movie thinking about how beautiful it all looked, I'd say it was you, and not the movie, that could use a little more introspection. I liked this movie a lot. I thought it was moving, chilling, depressing and unpredictable. Even the ending (NO SPOILERS HERE) could have gone a bunch of different ways, several of which would have been more conventional than what we are left with. A very good film, with excellent acting.

Unforgettable

Tsotsi is gorgeous, riveting, poignant, 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 abject 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.

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

"Tsotsi" should be seen on a big screen in order to fully appreciate its varied and intense look, performances and sound.

First the look. Even as writer/director Gavin Hood has updated Athol Fugard's novel to the new South Africa of an integrated police force, upscale blacks who can demand their attention vs. abandoned AIDS orphans, the settings in Johannesburg vs. Soweto with their sharp and horrific contrasts are not something American audiences have seen and almost seem as if they are from a futuristic post-apocalyptic vision. Each character is dramatically and very emotionally defined by the surroundings we see, where they once or currently live.

Not only is Lance Gewer's cinematography from day to night, from barren openness of no man's land to the closed-in dense township simply gorgeous, he is particularly good at capturing the luster of dark skin tones swathed in colorful clothes. Many scenes, particularly the excruciatingly violent ones, are heightened with dramatic lighting.

The actors grab the screen even amidst this extreme mise en scene. Presley Chweneyagae as the titularly nicknamed thug is not just physically charismatic, but the changes in his voice are gripping in communicating the extreme range of feelings he experiences over the few days the film takes place. This is a road trip through his soul, from flash backs to existential acts from his depths to finding his humanity (and his real name). His relationship with a cruelly accidental foundling infant has no comparison to the dozens of films, usually comedies, made around the world about an irresponsible guy stuck with a kid and how a child can be father to man. While his picaresque physical and psychic journey is almost as theatrical in its coincidences as "Crash", the tension is built up as it is unpredictable in each confrontation whether he will react violently or redemptively.

Just when I thought his side kicks were undifferentable, even they turned out to have complicated stories that were well portrayed, particularly Mothusi Magano as "Boston".

Terry Pheto as "Miriam" is the very essence of woman as bringer forth of life, from her artistic talents to her nourishing milk. She is beautiful and strong. It is rare to see maternal love so powerfully portrayed on film as by the women here.

The soundtrack of local South African music is wonderfully atmospheric, and I'm dancing in front of the computer while listening to the CD now. Particularly outstanding are the tracks by local kwaito artist Zola which uniquely combine local and international hip hop into a new sound, as well as tracks with the inspiring voice of Vasi Mahlasela over choirs, which recalls Ladysmith Black Mambazo. With an attention to detail in the music, the middle class family listens to soft R & B on their car radio, in comparison to the township sound that surrounds the Soweto residents.

Bravo for the very legible subtitles throughout and translated musical lyrics, even as we can occasionally pick out some pidgin English amidst the township jive.

Nice to see that an art house in Manhattan could attract a significant African-American audience for this film even before it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.