The winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign language film is a spiritual cousin to “Crash,” the winner of the best picture award. “Tsotsi,” from South Africa, is also about race, coincidence and people from different classes.
Both films, while well made, also share a literal approach that allows you to guess the ending well before it arrives. The story line of “Tsotsi” is based on a novel by South Africa’s mighty author, Athol Fugard, but it might have come from every gangland movie ever made.
The film is distinguished by its sometimes astonishing style – think of the hyper-Scorsese fireworks of “City of God” – and searing violence. The central character is a brutal young man known as Tsotsi, which is slang for thug.
He’s played by the unnerving Presley Chweneyagae.
Tstosi’s rage is so all-encompassing that he even alienates his crew of henchmen. Roving out of the Soweto slums one night, he steals a car and shoots the driver when she puts up an uncommon struggle to stop him.
Then he sees why she fought: a baby is in the car. Tsotsi impulsively grabs the kid and hustles back to his miserable shack, where a charade of surrogate parenthood is hatched.
If the plot feels pre-determined from there, “Tsotsi” director Gavin Hood nevertheless does a socko job of bringing Tsotsi’s world to life. The eruptions of violence are no more shocking than the overall picture of life in Soweto, which includes a children’s community of huge sewer pipes and abandoned cars – and orphans, who have created their own harsh world here.
But Hood’s approach can’t exactly be described as realism; the symbolic intrusion of a man in a wheelchair at a key moment in Tsotsi’s life, along with the saturated colors of the skies, is hardly the stuff of documentary. The story line recalls the kind of fable told by the Italian neo-realist filmmakers of the late 1940s, but told with 21st century digital effects.
In its blunt force, it’s effective. Which is exactly the kind of thing Oscar voters go for: an unambiguous film about something of obvious importance.
This shouldn’t be taken as a knock against “Tsotsi,” which is a pretty good movie, but it would be nice if the Oscar voters strayed outside their comfort zone once in a while.
“Tsotsi” HHH
Oscar worthy: The Oscar-winning best foreign film is a brutal, hyper-stylish South African film with a plot reminiscent of many a gangland tale: a young Soweto tough is altered when he is left in care of an infant.
Rated: R for language, violence, subject matter. In Tsotisaal, with English subtitles.
Now showing: Guild 45th, Seattle
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