Tsotsi

Directed by Gavin Hood

Miramax Films





By MOLLIE K. WRIGHT

CONTRIBUTING WRITER 



?We may have foreign language films, but our stories are the same as your stories. They’re about the human heart and emotion,? director Gavin Hood said Sunday in his acceptance speech for his cinematic creation “Tsotsi,”? this year’s Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film 

Hood, who both wrote and directed “Tsotsi,”? communicates this vast power of ?human heart and emotion? through a hardened man’s single experience with an innocent child. During the film’s hour-and-a-half run, the influence of one baby connects social classes, stops gang violence, and facilitates the discovery of love for the adults around him. Within this internationally acclaimed South African film, Hood brilliantly finds a sympathetic, yet not syrupy sweet, way to embrace life’s tragedies and also showcase its victories.  

Street-hooligan-turned-gang-leader Tsotsi, played by Presley Chweneyagae in his debut role, is from a township (ghetto) outside of Johannesburg, South Africa’s golden metropolis. Tsotsi (which in Afrikaans means “Thug”) bumbles out of his existentially meaningless life of violence when he steals a car and only later discovers a baby in the back seat.  

“Tsotsi” is adapted from award-winning playwright Athol Fugard’s compelling and humanistic novel by the same name. Both Hood and Fugard cling tightly to literary motifs, using themes of “decency” and “identity” to develop the protagonist from a street-hardened boy to a compassionate man with whom an audience can empathize. If not for Hood’s unique investigation into the nuances of life, Tsotsi’s complex psyche and troubled human interactions could have overwhelmed the film’s slow dramatization. 

Tsotsi’s often awkward interactions with the kidnapped baby parallel his painstaking personal development, as he reflects on aspects of his own difficult childhood. Chweneyagae’s features show no sense of tenderness during the rather violent opening sequence, but with his gradual growth of affection for the baby, his young face animatedly begins to embrace the necessity of his own bottled emotions. 

Hood does a superb job of setting the scene, using color and music befitting to each of the film’s locations. In the township, angry hip-hop swirls through the streets along with brownish-orange dust. This combination of aggressive music and parched earth casts an overall red tone to the scene. In contrast, the metropolitan and suburban shots adopt cool blues, silvers and greens to project the diametrically different standards of living.  

The hard music, provided by South African rap artist Zola, exemplifies Tsotsi’s originally hard-edged persona. However, after he steals the car and begins to bond with the child, the belligerent rap is replaced by composer Mark Kilian’s soothing tribal music.

The film’s amateur cast delivers amazingly deep performances, which can either be attributed to the strength of Hood’s vision or to its own African backgrounds. More often than rousing speeches (which could lose their effect on American audiences since the movie is in subtitles), silence and poignant facial expressions dominate the majority of the film. Hood’s actors pantomime his sermon of love for humanity and his hope for the alleviation of its suffering.  

Bottom Line: The juxtaposition of violence and beauty, of blatant subtlety and masked naivety, elevate the simple story line of Gavin Hood’s “Tsotsi” to an Oscar-winning, emotionally profound masterpiece.