Common Sense Note
Parents should know the movie shows kids and young people living on the streets and in poverty in South Africa, with scenes showing harsh violence (stabbing, shooting, beating), drinking and drug use, the accidental kidnapping of a baby during a carjacking, posters warning against AIDS, and the parents' subsequent distress. The focus is on a young hoodlum, whose initial inability to cope with the infant's needs leads to terrible mistakes (the baby is covered with ants and filth, cries, needs food). He holds a gun on a young woman to force her to breastfeed the baby; he beats one friend and regrets it; he kills another in order to stop more violence.
Families can discuss Tsotsi's transformation, from tough-fronting street gangster to vulnerable, generous young man. How does the movie show how he became so callous, with flashbacks to his mother's illness and death, his father's abuse, and Tsotsi's subsequent lack of a home and stability? How do you come to understand the reasons for his cruelty, even as you hope he changes his attitude? How does the baby's helplessness affect Tsotsi's necessary focus on his own survival, before all else? How does the young mother help him to change his mind-set?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Last year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, TSOTSI is a brutal, affecting film about a young man's turn from violence to almost incomprehensible generosity. The movie's first image is dice, as a small group of homeless kids gamble both as distraction and with their lives.
The leader is 19-year-old Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae). He and his crew -- Butcher (Zenzo Ngqobe), Aap (Kenneth Nkosi), and Boston (Mothusi Magano) -- live in Soweto, where they deal drugs, steal, and scavenge to get by. For the evening's work, they head to the train station in search of someone to rob. En route, they pass public service posters that warn against AIDS ("HIV affects us all"), a detail that marks a change from the film's source, Athol Fugard's novel, which was set in the 1950s (published in 1980). Gavin Hood's film takes place in a harsh, amorphous now. This shift underlines the persistence of risks in the South African townships: the particular danger may shift, but hopelessness and fury go on.
After they commit a robbery and murder on a crowded train, Tsotsi and his boys head to a pub, where they drink and argue. When Boston says Tsotsi -- whose name means "thug" -- lacks "decency," he erupts, smashing Boston's face repeatedly before their friends can pull him off. Part horrified, part angry, Tsotsi runs into the night, where he finds his ostensible fate, in a BMW he carjacks while the driver (Nambitha Mpumlwana) waits for her driveway gate to open. She fights him hard for her vehicle, too hard, it seems, until he gets down the road and discovers her infant in the back seat. Abruptly, Tsotsi has new options.
His choice to keep the baby and leave the car changes everything and nothing. Loading the baby into a shopping bag, Tsotsi traverses the wide emptiness between the highway and the shantytown. At home, a shack with a sheet metal door he keeps chained shut with a padlock, he feeds the baby condensed milk from a can, diapers it with newspaper, and leaves it in the bag under his bed while he goes out cruising for new trouble. When he returns to find the filthy baby covered in ants, he faces a consequence of a decision he's made.
Tsotsi sees himself in the infant, underlined by flashbacks to his tragic childhood (his mother [Sindi Shambule] dies of AIDS, his father [Israel Makoe] kicks dogs). When he spots Miriam (Terry Pheto) at the market, her own baby tied to her back as she waits to buy food, Tsotsi forces her to breastfeed his new charge.
When Tsotsi tries to give the baby away to homeless children closer to its age, he visits them in their nowhereland, namely, the drainage pipes on the outskirts of town, where he used to live. As he holds out the baby in a bag, this next scrawny generation stares at Tsotsi as if he's crazy. They can't imagine caring for anyone else, just as he can't. At last, he does figure out a decent way to cope; he finds himself, after an impossibly hard life.
Families who like this film should read Athol Fugard's novel. They might also see other kids-in-trouble films like Menace II Society, or films where kids find ways out, like Sarafina! or the excellent documentary, Boys of Baraka.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentWoman nurses a child with her breast partially exposed. |
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ViolenceA disturbingly slow and quiet assault with an ice pick; brutal beating that leaves victim's face a bloody pulp; carjacking that leaves woman driver beaten and horrified. |
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LanguageProfanity in subtitles (f-word included). |
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Social BehaviorCharacters are thieves and brutes by socialization; they lie, steal, and commit violence; one is redeemed when he learns to give up his needs for a baby's. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoCharacters drink (some drunken behavior by 18- and 19-year-olds), smoke cigarettes, and take drugs. |
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