Tsotsi Movie Review
- Artfully combining and complimenting with each other the story and technical aspects of the film, the results are an unparalleled synergistic relationship, seamlessly interweaving the film's ever.
- Based on a play by Athol Fugard, Tsotsi is South Africa's entry in this year's Oscar race for Best Foreign-Language Film. This remarkable movie means to shake you, and boy does it ever.
In the street language of Johannesburg, Tsotsi means a street thug or gang member - an appropriate moniker for the main character (Presley Chweneyagae) in this brutal, gripping drama. Tsotsi's mean life of thievery and murder is thrown when a carjacking episode leaves him caring for a young baby. Repressed memories of his own wretched childhood surface and watching the realisation of what he's become dawn on him is powerful stuff. Comparisons with City Of God are not undeserved.
Movie Info A South African hoodlum named Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae) lives by a code of violence, and he and his gang of thugs prowl the streets of Johannesburg day and night, attacking those who.
Director Gavin Hood throws up a township filled with breeze blocks and corrugated iron and, although the lens filters are on the heavy side, he paints a real gulf between the gated world of the baby's affluent parents and Tsotsi's polluted, impoverished domain. Saddled with junior but unable to give him up, Tsotsi is forced to think about someone else for the first time in his life. So the baby spends long indignant periods hidden in a paper shopping bag as Tsotsi ferries him to the young mother (Terry Pheto) he press gangs into wet nursing.
'A CAULDRON OF SIMMERING RAGE'
While the childhood roots of Tsotsi's criminal behaviour are made a little too obvious, Hood infuses his work with such passion it's something that's easily overlooked. Filmed almost entirely in Tsotsi-Taal, the street patois spoken in the townships, it thrums to a pulsating soundtrack of bass-heavy kwaito music. Through all this, babyface Chweneyagae skulks with awesome menace, a cauldron of simmering rage and frustration and a performance of real skill, carrying the film effortlessly through to the nail-shredding conclusion.
In Afrikaans and Tsotsi-Taal with English subtitles.
by Lybarger
'Why does this movie work? Location, location, location.' |
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In fact, the novel by Athol Fugard that Hood has adapted for the film dates back to 1960. Somehow, Hood and his cast make the story relevant and even urgent.
The title character (played with astonishing skill by relative novice Presley Chweneyagae) easily lives up to his moniker, which means thug or gangster in Zulu. In a single evening, he does nothing when his aptly named pal Butcher (Zenzo Ngqobe) stabs a fellow they’ve been mugging to death. Tsotsi later beats his partner in crime named Boston (Mothusi Magano) so badly that the latter may be scarred for life.
Whereas most gangsters might end their evening at that point, Tsotsi wanders into a suburb of Johannesburg and steals a wealthy woman’s car and shoots her as she gets away.
His spree comes to an abrupt end when he discovers the woman’s baby is still in the car’s back seat. From here, Tsotsi gradually develops a conscience and takes a difficult path toward resolving the situation. To keep the setup credible, Hood presents the bleak squalor of township life with an unflinching eye. He also wisely ends the tale on an ambiguous note. Tsotsi may be on a path away from wickedness, but his life and the lives of the others he encounters won’t get any easier.
The early sequences of “Tsotsi” present the violence in his world in brief but shocking detail. As a result, it’s easier to believe what happens later. Hood also creates a convincing back story that illustrates how Tsotsi could fall so easily.
Good acting doesn’t hurt either. Chweneyagae effortlessly moves from being a cold-eyed criminal to staring in wonder at the baby in front of him. Terry Pheto is terrific as a single mother whom Tsotsi recruits at gunpoint to help him take care of the child. She becomes a surrogate mother to both the baby and the gangster who abducted him.
Israel Makoe deserves special credit for convincingly playing what has to be one of the most sadistically terrifying fathers in screen history.
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The film also boasts a great soundtrack full of tunes that fit the action nicely, but the most admirable trait of “Tsotsi” is that its sentimental moments earn every emotion they are designed to elicit.
Tsotsi 2005 Movie
originally posted:04/23/06 07:05:51
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