TSOTSI

Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Miramax Films
Grade: A-
Directed by: Gavin Hood
Written by: Gavin Hood, novel by Athol Fugard
Cast: Presley Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto, Kenneth Nkosi,
Mothusi Magano, Zenzo Ngqobe
Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 1/26/06

Spiro Agnew,one of our country’s more bubble-headed vice presidents, once said, “If you’ve seen one city slum, you’ve seem them all.” Anti-intellectual though Agnew was, his quote bears at least a smidgen of truth. Ghettos, the politically correct term for slums, generally have poor if any opportunities to shop for goods or to bank your money, the dwellings worldwide ranging from tar-paper shacks to dilapidated brick buildings and decent, though colorless, projects. The young residents who live there are more likely than those who grow up on New York’s Upper East Side to be violent, untutored, and uncaring. Such a ghetto is depicted in Gavin Hood’s “Tsotsi,”which is based on playwright Athol Fugard’s 1960s novel and has been brought up to the 21st century to make the pic more immediate and less costly than a period piece would be. The translation from the mostly psychological novel dealing with the goings-on in the main character’s head is tops: Hood succeeds in letting us into the mind of the title character while displaying the young man’s redemption from an anti-social, uncaring criminal to one who is redeemed, unfortunately after it’s too late. The film, spoken in the Tsotsi-Taal dialogue of Soweto’s mean streets, is South Africa’s entry into the Oscar race for bestr foreign movie of 2005. It deserves a nomination.

The subject matter will be familiar to anyone who has seen Fernando Meirelles’s year 2002 Brazilian masterwork, “City of God,” which is more loosely structured than Gavin Hood’s movie, The favelas of Meirelles’s Rio have much in common with the slums of Soweto. While the Carioca criminals are younger and even less civilized than the folks depicted by Mr. Hood, the drugs and the indifference of residents to civilized mores, are diseases born of government indifference. The guy nicknamed Tsotsi (meaning “thug”), relishes the sobriquet, reverting to his real name at the moment of his redemption. Presley Chweneyagae, in his feature film debut, is astonishing. His eyes reflect nothing more than ice-cold indifference to those who populate his surroundings: he has never gone to school and doubtless would not be able even to spell his name.

Tsotsi, who makes a living by doing jobs for Fela (Zola)–at one point handing a shiny new Mercedes to Fela’s garage of stolen cars which are broken up for parts--hangs out with slum guys his own age, including Boston (Mothusi Magano) and Butcher (Zenzo Ngqobe). But Tsotsi is more violent than his colleagues, delivering a sound lashing to one of them, Boston (Mothusi Magano), who merely rides the man by accusing him of having no feeling for anyone. The beating, of course, proves the man’s point. One example of the gang’s anarchism occurs early on as they spot a large man exchanging a sum of money with someone on the street, follow him into the subway, and order him quietly to hand over the envelope while confronting him with a long ice pick. (The mugging brings to mind the case of our own Bernhard Goetz who shot all four muggers who surrounded him in a New York subway car a couple of decades back.) When the victim protests, he is stabbed to death, unseen by any of the other passengers, and is propped up by the gang of four until the train empties out, at which point he is left, dead, crumpled up on the floor. Who says only New Yorkers see no evil?

Tsotsi’s moment of awakening occurs when on a whim, he steals the car of a wealthy woman (Nambitha Mpumlwana), shoots and seriously wounds her, and discovers only later than her baby lies crying on the back seat of the auto. (The infant is played by twins, Nonthuthu Sibisi and Nthuthuko Sibisi.) We might expect Tsotsi to toss the baby out, given his readiness to kill, but instead he diapers the baby with newspapers, conceals him from the rest of his gang, and ultimately finds someone, Miriam (Terry Pheto), a single mother with a baby of her own, to breast-feed the child. His relationship with Miriam, who reveals that her husband was killed in a mugging, is central to Tsotsi’s new way of looking at his world, as he watches the kind and attractive woman caring for the baby over a period of weeks while not reporting the situation to the police. He notes as well that she has decorated her hovel with pieces of colored glass strung to the ceiling. Tsotsi sees nothing more than broken glass. Miriam sees color and light. The film’s bleak look before this point becomes progressively more colorful as Tsotsi begins the road to maturity and civilization.

Gavin Hood spends just a few moments revealing the background to Tsotsi’s criminal ways, with a flashback to his brutal father (Israel Makoe) who at one point kicks a barking Rottweiler so hard that the poor dog, back broken, could only crawl, and to his mother (Sindi Shambule), who is dying of AIDS.

Unlike the typical noirish film of this sort which relies on grainy film-making, “Tsotsi” is sharply and cleanly photographed by Lance Gewer, setting the villas of the upper-middle class residents of Jo-Burg against the bleak, dilapidated shacks that house those of nearby Soweto. The background music, Kwaito combines the rhythm from marabi sounds of the 1920s and the bubblegum music of the 1980s, together with traditional Imibongo, or African praise poetry. The soundtrack is lovely and appropriate for well-acted film this spiritual and epic.

Rated R 94 minutes © 2006 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com Member: NY Film Critics Online