"TSOTSI"
- THUGLIFE IN THE TOWNSHIP
By
Erica Hector Vital
Red Rock Review
Las Vegas Round The Clock
http://www.lasvegasroundtheclock.com
ericavital@cox.net
ericav@theflickchicks.com
ericav@lasvegasroundtheclock.com
TSOTSI
Written and
Directed by: Gavin Hood
Based on the novel by Athol Fugard
TSOTSI: THUGLIFE IN THE TOWNSHIP
There is real danger in bringing the life of a South African street thug to
the screen.
Aside from the fact that South African film director Gavin Hood has himself
been mugged on the streets of Johannesburg, and that statistics on
kidnappings, murder, and mayhem continue to rise in post-apartheid South
Africa as the rate of joblessness and homelessness also rise, there is the
threat of glorifying the rage of yet another young man of color turned
predator, the danger of romanticizing hunger and canonizing hopelessness.
TSOTSI, this year’s Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film begins with
the proverbial roll of the dice, a comment on the fickle nature of the fates
which determine who is victim who is king, who is lost who is found, by a
filmmaker whose country was built on the arbitrary nature of one group
determining where another group would stand in relation to the great power
divide. The young man at the dice is the thug for which the film, based on
the book by South African author Athol Fugard, is named. Tsotsi (Presley
Chweneyagae) is feral-eyed and cold, brutally arrogant, even as he makes the
childlike mistake of claiming eleven while black pips on white ivory grant
him yet another losing number.
With the percussive beats of South African hitmaker Zola driving behind the
grit and the clamour of life in the township, we are truly in danger of
falling prey to the loose-limbed walk of the quintessential gangster and the
tantalizing mixture of the bold faces, imagined smells, and brassy colors of
an impoverished, urbanized South Africa.
Even as your heart breaks frame by frame watching Tsotsi stumble from one
brutal act to another, you are seduced by Gavin Hood’s work with the camera,
how he allows action to unfold with purpose rather than with the desperate
urgency that has come to define American crime drama.
Hood builds believable moments for each member of Tsotsi’s crew. There is
the moral center, Boston (Mothusi Magano), who winds up on the wrong side of
Tsotsi’s predatory radar when in the aftermath of a horrifying murder in a
South African subway station, Boston asks, “Have you ever heard of the word
decency, Tsotis?” It is a line of questioning that nearly costs Boston his
life. Along with Boston’s voice of reason there is the comic relief of the
hapless Aap (Kenneth Nkosi), and Tsotsi’s bleaker alterego, Butcher (Zenzo
Ngqobe), who in his remorseless leaps of violence portends a Tsotsi yet to
be. Butcher is a nightmare made real, who throughout the film is armed with
one of the most lethal weapons in cinematic history, a weapon that could
only evolve out of the ruthless rootlessness of the South African township
director Gavin Hood brings to the screen with a bracing, and often
beautiful, reality.
In his first professional film role, Presley Chweneyagae earns a place for
himself in the classic lineup of gangster iconography. Cagney in WHITE HEAT,
Pacino in SCARFACE, are cinematic forefathers to this young South African
who as the character Tsotsi chooses fatherlessness.
No one has shown us the heartwrenching void that lies at the center of the
sociopathetic outlaw quite like Pacino’s Tony Montana, which is why true
gangster cultists love him. It was a mother’s love that fueled the bloodlust
of both Montana and Cagney’s Cody Jarrett, that desperate hunt for
connection that hammered out such brutal and vulnerable men. It is Tsotsi’s
quest for humanity, the lowest demominator of human interaction, let alone
compassion, that slowly and tragically surfaces from the ashes as Tsotsi
throws himself into the penultimate act of brutality when late one night he
leaves his crew and carjacks a surburban woman at gunpoint, unwittingly
driving away with the woman’s infant still strapped in the backseat.
Terry Pheto as Miriam, a young woman whose life is virtually held hostage by
Tsotsi for a time, is a reminder of beauty and perseverance in the midst of
the township’s Wild West barbarism. South African popstar Zola, featured on
the film’s soundtrack, is confident and watchable as outlaw-entrepreneur
Fela, and Thembi Nyandeni provides a bit of maternal grounding for Tsotsi’s
crew as the shebeen proprietor Soekie in bar scenes Hood films with a murky
lustre.
Perhaps it is director Gavin Hood’s willingness to show all, tell all, and
let the characters be all in dimension and motivation that lifts this crime
drama out of the dangerous territory of romantizing the criminal and
glamorizing Third World conditions, so that what Hood does deliver is a love
letter to a nation known for its lack of decency and still striving for
reconcilation in its courts and in its streets. TSOTSI is Hood’s Dear John
letter to an emerging post-apartheid generation, a Dear TSOTSI, that can
confess love even as it introduces the harsh and tragic consequences of
finding it too late.
CLASSIC GANGSTER DRIVEN CRIME-DRAMA
