TSOTSI (South Africa, 2005, 94 min.), directed by Gavin Hood; screenplay by Gavin Hood from the novel by Athol Fugard; cinematography by Lance Gewer; music by Paul Hepker and Mark Kilian, with performances by Zola and by Vusi Mahlasela; edited by Megan Gill; with Presley Chweneyagae (Tsotsi), Terry Pheto (Miriam), Kenneth Nkosi (Aap), Mothusi Magano (Boston), Zenzo Ngqobe (Butcher), Zola (Fela), Rapulana Seiphemo (John Dube), Nambitha Mpumlwana (Pumla Dube), Jerry Mofokeng (Morris), Ian Roberts (Captain Smit), Percy Matsemela (Sergeant Zuma), Thembi Nyandeni (Soekie), Owen Sejake (Gumboot Dlamini), Israel Makoe (Tsotsi’s Father), Sindi Khambule (Tsotsi’s Mother). In Zulu, Xhosa, and Afrikaans with English subtitles.

To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life. Totsi feared nothingness. He feared it because he believed in it. Even more than that, he knew with all the certainty of his being that behind the façade of life lurked nothing. – Athol Fugard, Tsotsi (1980)

They while away their days, these young men, in one of their shanty rooms, or in some shabeen (a semi-legal Township bar, generally run by a tough, no-nonsense woman), drinking, smoking, playing dice or cards, waiting for night to come. There is the one they call Die Aap (The Ape), big, compliant, ready to do damage, with a smile. There is the one they call Butcher, a powder keg with a permanent scowl. There is the one they call Teacher, who is older than the others, and possesses a deep intelligence befuddled by remorse and alcohol. And there is the one they call Tsotsi, which in the language of the street makes him the generic Thug or Hood. He is sharp, callous, and ruthless, using his anonymity as the intimidating weapon that makes him the leader, and keeps him always separate from the others. He does, of course, have a name—it is David—but he has willed himself to forget it, and has very nearly succeeded.

These are the characters of Athol Fugard’s masterful short novel, Tsotsi, written before the South African achieved international fame as a playwright with Boesman and Lena (1969), Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972), and Master Harold . . . and the Boys (1982). Finally published in 1980, it is an extremely well-written novel, poetic in its descriptions, successfully drawing us into the interior world of the young monster who is its central character. Once there, we begin to follow this young man on an unanticipated and unwanted series of events that lead him to rediscover his name, and to experience a kind of redemption.

There are three primary catalysts in this journey, all of which occur when he is alone and away from his gang. The first occurs when he is out casing a white neighborhood for a simple score. He happens upon a young black woman, a pathetically easy victim. He assaults and starts to rape her, when he is stopped by the sound of a baby’s cry. It is coming from a shoebox that she is carrying. She thrusts the box into his hands and, stunned, he allows her to run away. She had presumably been in the process of disposing of this unwanted child, and has found a way to do so. So the Thug becomes the unexpected guardian of this strange creature whom no one wants. He should dispose of himself, but he doesn’t. Instead, he keeps the baby for his own without quite knowing why he is doing so.

The second encounter is with Morris Tshabalala, a beggar severely crippled in the mines, a double-amputee who must drag his useless body around by hands calloused and hard as rocks. He is just the kind of defenseless victim that Tsotsi and the gang love to steal from. But Tsotsi doesn’t steal from Morris this time. Morris reminds him in a curious way of something in his past, a memory that is returning to haunt him. Morris is also a man who revels in small things, in the warmth that the sun gives to the pavement, who clings to life despite having every reason not to. He is the kind of man whose life Tsotsi would have once been able to take without a thought, but now he cannot.

The third catalyst is a young single mother named Miriam. Her husband went to work one day and never returned—most likely the victim of a hoodlum like Tsotsi. She is still nursing her own baby, so it is natural for Tsotsi to try to brutalize her into feeding his. He is successful in that, but it will ultimately compel him to give up the last of his self-imposed indifference and blindness, accept the truth of his past, and become vulnerable.

* * *

The adaptation of Fugard’s novel by Gavin Hood (both screenwriter and director) maintains the dramatic core of the novel but transports it to a very contemporary, post-Apartheid Johannesburg. The baby in the film is the son of black middle class parents, who live behind their walls and gates in wealth and comfort, if not in real security. (They are able to call upon the police to search for their child, which adds a further element of tension to Tsotsi’s story.) The film is shot almost entirely on location, mainly in the poor townships, but also in the downtown area of this very large city (more than 3 million inhabitants), notably Park Station, Johannesburg’s huge central train station, to which young men come from the townships for some action. AIDS makes its way into the story, both via cautionary billboards and via the mystery of what has happened to Tsotsi’s mother (in the novel she is swept away in a police raid on the shantytown in which they lived).

The real challenge in adapting the novel was to find cinematic ways of externalizing the interior life, the coming-to-consciousness, of the young protagonist. Fortunately, Gavin Hood chose to avoid using voice-over monologue, but instead sought visual means to communicate internal thoughts. Close-ups of Tsotsi and the other characters give us glimpses into their internal struggles. Sudden, striking memory images (e.g., of boys sheltering themselves from the rain in a stack of huge sewage pipes), give way to longer flashbacks as the film goes on, revealing Tsotsi’s yielding to his past. Another challenge was finding a way to present the terrible violence that underlies the film without sensationalizing it and romanticizing the gangsta life. The director deliberately chose to have the violence occur suddenly, abruptly, and without warning (as it does in real life), but to happen mainly offscreen, and to focus instead on what he calls “the after-effects of violence.” It is quite effective. Athol Fugard, by the way, was very pleased with the adaptation, which he felt captured the spirit of the novel very successfully. (He called it the best adaptation of his works that has so far been done.)

A good deal of the film’s success in bringing this world to life is due to its actors. The cast is a mélange of newcomers and experienced professionals. Twenty-year-old Presley Chweneyagae, himself the product of a township upbringing, brings both sensitivity and ferocity to his first film role (he had been in plays before). This was also the first film role for Terry Pheto, who plays Miriam (she subsequently had a role in the 2006 film Catch a Fire). The actors playing Boston, Morris, and Aap, on the other hand, came in with considerable theatrical experience and cinematic (the actor playing Aap is a well known figure in a South African comic sitcom). Director Gavin Hood, himself a film and television actor, was ultimately able to use their different styles and experience levels to the advantage of the film.

The film also manages to capture the look and feel of township life, young people whose talk and dress, music and ambitions combine traditional township with Western-style hip-hop, TV, and movies. The music is a blend of the lyrical, haunting voice of Vusi Mahlasela and the harder edge of the “Kwaito” style (a blend of house music and hip hop that began to emerge in South Africa in the early 1990s), which helps to establish the film’s pulsing energy; the film includes songs by Zola, the huge star of Kwaito music, who plays the flashy gangster Fela in the film. The dynamic cinematography, with its crane shots soaring above the township to reveal the city beyond, along with its careful use of color and lighting, also contributes to the particular feel of this place at this time.

But along with its ability to capture this moment in contemporary South Africa, Tsotsi uses its roots in the Fugard novel to tell a very timeless story, one that in its essence could be found nearly anywhere on the planet: the story of a young man painfully coming to terms with the wrong turns that he has taken in his life, and beginning to take responsibility for them. al

The film won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, the first film from Africa to be so named, along with top honors at many film festivals around the world.

--Notes by Michael Dembrow

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