Tsotsi

NOTE: SPOILER ALERT!

Redemption is an oft-used and powerful theme in motion pictures, and I'm a sucker for it. My favorite example is Casablanca, about a man who has ceased caring about anything but himself who finally realizes there is a greater good. Redemption is also the theme of Tsotsi, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film. Set in South Africa, it is the story of a vicious thief, who is called Tsotsi (a word meaning thug or delinquent), who undergoes a life-changing experience when he carjacks a woman and ends up kidnapping her baby.

Tsotsi gives those who do not live in Africa an interesting look at a culture. The kids who live in the township, which is really a shanytown of glorified shacks (some children live in pipes, which Tsotsi also did for a time) wander into the gentrified city. Tsotsi and his gang enter the city like animals in search of prey. There are four members of the gang: Tsotsi; Boston, who is educated but an alcoholic; Butcher, who is blood-thirsty, and Aap, who does whatever Tsotsi tells him to do.

Though this setting is exotic to Westerners, the film's director, Gavin Hood, who adapted the tale from a novel by Athol Fugard, has made a very conventional picture. Once Tsotsi has kidnapped the baby, he starts to change. He sees a crippled beggar in a new light. He looks at the mobiles by a neighbor woman and seems to understand a bit about art. He even goes so far as to apologize to someone whom he did wrong.

Then, finally, he makes the ultimate sacrifice for redemption, his freedom. In the final scene he has shucked his black leather jacket and wears a bright white shirt, something a thief in the night would never wear, and his final gesture he appears almost angelic.

The actor who plays Tsotsi, Presley Chweneyagae, acts mostly with his eyes. In the beginning of the film they are dead, the eyes of a killer. But soon they start to soften. It's an intuitive, admirable performance. I just thought the transformation came too quickly and too easily. Perhaps in the novel there is more chance for this change to take place naturally, but in the film the change is fairly abrupt. In a flashback, we see that Tsotsi's father was cruel, and that he does not want to become his father, so bearing responsibility for a baby triggers emotions from Tsotsi that he did know he had. But this ends up being very pat and routine.

The action is intercut with the police investigation (an echo of the larger South Africa is that one of the detectives is white) and the anguish of the baby's parents, an upper-class black family. The actor who plays the father is particularly affecting.

Tsotsi is a well-made film that tugs on all the right places, I just found it surprisingly conventional. Perhaps that is why a film about young hoodlums could actually win the Foreign Language award, which usually goes to square movies.