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'Tsotsi': The Broken Heart of South Africa
By Desson Thomson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 10, 2006; Page C01
By Desson Thomson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 10, 2006; Page C01
For the 19-year-old man-child they call Tsotsi -- Johannesburg street slang for "thug" -- it has come down to this: He has burst into an apartment, pulled out a gun and forced the woman inside to breast-feed an infant -- the one he's carrying around in a shopping bag.
How this intimidating hoodlum stumbled into this situation is the white-knuckle business of "Tsotsi," the South African film that was named Best Foreign Language Film at last weekend's Oscars. A mixture of thrilling documentary-style realism and Hollywood hokum, "Tsotsi" leaves you all but tasting the orange dust of Joburg's shantytowns and moved by the harrowing journey Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae) is forced to take.
Presley Chweneyagae's Tsotsi goes from gangbanger to goo-goo in the Oscar-winning film. (Ster-kinekor Films Via Associated Press)
He starts that journey as a practically inhuman predator, who mugs people and jacks cars without a trace of conscience. After pocketing the money or unloading the hot car, he leads his gang into the local shebeen (illegal drinking joint), where they listen to kwaito music (the Johannesburg equivalent of rap) and plan for the next day's business.
Tsotsi's life takes an unexpected turn, however, when he steals a BMW from an affluent middle-aged woman (Nambitha Mpumlwana). Surprised at her show of resistance, he fires a bullet into her stomach. As he pulls away, he realizes why she fought so hard. There's a 3-month-old baby in the back. In shock, he totals the car. Now he's stuck with a bum car and a living child.
Tsotsi, whose gang recently shivved an old man to death for not handing over his wallet and who then beat up fellow gang member Boston (Mothusi Magano) for giving him grief about it, is suddenly ambushed by softness: an innocent face that reminds him of his lost childhood. He stuffs the baby into a bag and starts running. Which brings us back to the breastfeeding scene.
South African filmmaker Gavin Hood wrote and directed this adaptation of Athol Fugard's novel of the same name. The book, which Fugard (a white South African) wrote in the early 1960s and set in the since-demolished Sophiatown of the 1950s, has been updated to the present, largely for pragmatic reasons: It was cheaper than creating authentic sets of that era. But the modernization adds a deeper resonance by showing that post-apartheid South Africa is perhaps no less oppressive.
Despite apartheid's dissolution in 1991, the film shows how two starkly different worlds of rich and poor continue to exist. And if apartheid is no longer a blight on the land, AIDS has handily taken over. There are few references to the disease in the movie -- a government poster at a train station and flashback revelations of how Tsotsi's parents died -- but enough to convey a sense of hopelessness. Signs of squalor, such as the hovel-like homes and the abandoned drainage pipes that serve as sleeping quarters for children, complete the depressing canvas and show how a monster such as Tsotsi could emerge.
With a story that personalizes street gangsters and their gritty existence, "Tsotsi" is reminiscent of Fernando Meirelles's "City of God," which did the same for thugs in the favelas (slums) of Brazil. But unlike Meirelles, Hood softens the unrelenting harshness whenever he can.
This explains, but doesn't necessarily justify, an often-syrupy score that drips over a few too many scenes. There is also the hint of a romantic relationship between Tsotsi and Miriam (Terry Pheto) -- the woman he forces to breast-feed the child -- that seems forced in for mainstream audiences. And Hood seems compelled to put a backlighting glow behind every African actor as if they are God's special children, or those supple farmers of the old Soviet propaganda films, or even Disney's animated woodland creatures.
The faces of actors such as Chweneyagae and Pheto are authentic and powerful in their own right. As Tsotsi, for instance, Chweneyagae turns his face into a living battle mask -- curved, molded and sandpapered into smooth ruthlessness. There seems to be nothing human about him, not even his predatory eyes. But as the story unfolds, that mask begins to crack, and his humanity begins to flow through. A transformation like that needs no music or klieg lights.
