Review of Tsotsi (2005) by Eklektik E — 06 Jan 2012

TSOTSI won the Academy Award for Foreign Language film, and had been on my list of films I've wanted to see since I first read of its nomination. It took me four years to get around to finally seeing the film, and I was not disappointed.

The story of a South African "thug" (which is what "Tsotsi" means), TSOTSI is cleanly-written, well-acted, competently-directed and emotionally-impactful, with an ending I did not expect.

Tsotsi leads a loosely-organized and small gang of petty criminals in Johannesburg, though he is clearly more capable of great violence, even cold-blooded murder without a guilty conscience. Two of the other three members of his group of thieves are easily controlled by Tsotsi, and the third is beaten severely by him for questioning his understanding of what "decency" is when a robbery shown early in the film is taken to an extreme.

Asking Tsotsi to consider "decency" is clearly an insult to him, but the joke is on him when he goes out on his own and ends up finding a baby in the back seat of the car he's stolen. No matter how horrible he is -- no matter how blank his stare and cold his heart -- he cannot kill a baby.

Nor can he care for it. He keeps the infant in a shopping bag under his bed and uses newspapers as diapers. He feeds it whatever he can, though nothing is appropriate for an infant of that age. Inevitably, he returns again to violence, holding a local woman at gunpoint until she breastfeeds the baby.

When the woman finds out that the baby's mother is still alive, she encourages Tsotsi to return the baby, or at least give him to her to care for. In a powerful flashback sequence, we see in just one scene what turned Tsotsi into a street thug and created his hardened outlook on life and parenting.

What makes TSOTSI such an excellent film is that it doesn't end in full-blown disaster as one might expect, but it also doesn't end in an unrealistic, "It's a Wonderful Life"-like revelation about changing one's ways. In the end, Tsotsi does not necessarily become a "good person." He just becomes a bad person who is able to stop doing bad things for a few minutes, and those minutes are precious.

TSOTSI is a spare, low-key film with a quick running time and no side plots. It's like a great short story, which makes sense, as it's based on a book by the great writer Athol Fugard. If you let this one get past you as I did, it's worth your time to go back and find it. It's hard to find movies about redemption that don't do redemption like, well, the movies...