Academy Award Winner: Best Foreign Language Film
Tsotsi (2005) is the gritty tale of a brutish young hoodlum finding his humanity because of a chance encounter with a baby. The film comes from the country of South Africa, and the cast is made up of unknowns. The story is told in a straightforward manner, and camerawork and editing are unobtrusive. But there are lots of close-ups of faces, and this is one of the most emotionally engaging movies I've seen in a long time.
The Title, the Language, the ProtagonistAccording to the film's official Web site, "the word 'tsotsi' means a black urban criminal, a street thug or gang member in the vernacular of black townships in South Africa." That Web site goes on to state that "tsotsis talk Tsotsi-Taal, … the South African township slang which is made up of Afrikaans and a mixture of all other local vernacular languages like Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana and Sotho." While listening to the movie's dialogue, I could hear that quite a number of English words seem to have been brought over into Tsotsi-Taal, but I still had to rely heavily on reading the subtitles.
The central character in the film goes by the street name "Tsotsi," and in the early part of the movie he becomes enraged when someone presses him for his real name. He's so desperate to maintain the hoodlum persona he's worked so hard to create that he won't risk revealing even the smallest bit of personal information. But one evening when Tsotsi commits a horrible crime, a situation arises which eventually causes him to recognize that he is capable of feeling compassion.
A Thug, a Baby and a Motherly Young WomanTsotsi is a feral young thug who lives in a Johannesburg shantytown. He is the leader of a gang consisting of himself and three other young hoodlums. As the film opens, these four punks commit a mugging that turns into a murder.
Later, Tsotsi wanders into an affluent suburb and seizes an opportunity to steal a luxury car. He shoots the owner and drives away, but soon discovers there's a baby in the rear seat. Unwilling to abandon the infant, Tsotsi takes it back to his shack, where he quickly realizes he's incapable of caring for it. At the shantytown communal water tap, he spots a mother with her own baby and follows her home. There he forces her at gunpoint to breast-feed the infant he has abducted. But as these events unfold, Tsotsi is beginning to change.
Kwaito Music and ZolaI was completely unfamiliar with the kind of music used on the Tsotsi soundtrack, and it's called Kwaito. It emerged in South Africa in the 1990s and is extremely popular there. The Kwaito music on the soundtrack is performed by an artist known as Zola, and his brand of Kwaito bears some similarities to American hip-hop. Zola appears briefly on camera in Tsotsi in the role of the well-dressed hoodlum Fela. One of the DVD's bonus materials is a music video featuring Zola.
An Outstanding Audio Commentary by the FilmmakerThe Tsotsi DVD provides an English-language audio commentary track for the feature movie by writer-director Gavin Hood, and it's one of the best I've heard by any filmmaker. The movie is based on a novel by Athol Fugard, and Hood gives some details on how he went about adapting the book. Johannesburg is Hood's hometown, and he makes some interesting remarks about shooting on location there. He also gives the inside scoop on how the scene with ants on the baby's face was done and the handling of the scene where a dog crawls around after Tsotsi's father has cruelly broken its back.
Additional DVD Bonus MaterialsThe DVD contains a 14-minute making-of featurette that gives you a chance to see what writer-director Gavin Hood looks like and the opportunity to hear from Presley Chweneyagae, who plays Tsotsi, out of character and speaking English.
Also on the DVD are a pair of alternate endings, as well as three deleted scenes. All of these can optionally be viewed while listening to commentary by Hood. The most interesting of these to me is the powerful deleted scene "Boston's Confession," which lasts for more than five minutes. Hood says he deleted the scene despite how good it is because it takes the focus off the film's central character for too long.
Finally, the DVD contains Hood's 1998 short The Storekeeper, a crime drama set in rural South Africa. This is an excellent little film which has narrative drive, yet for its entire 22-minute duration, it has no dialogue whatsoever. After you watch the short, you'll probably want to run it again with Hood's commentary turned on.
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