Tsotsi, ruthless killer or misguided individual?

While there isn’t any frameless personalities or any broken images in the film tsotsi, there is still an underlying tone of familiarity between Bessie Head’s Motabeng and Tsotsi(David’s) Soweto in South Africa.

It took nearly five minutes for Tsotsi to even say a word and when he did, they were merely short one or two word answers. The acting wasn’t bad but you could definitely tell this was an indi-film. I particularly enjoyed the setting and the contrast between both the inviting suburbs where Tsotsi steals the car and baby, and the shacks where he and his “gang” live in. I wouldn’t necessarily say that Head’s character Elizabeth went from two different economic extremes such as these but the idea is vaguely there.

The particular item that is vividly there between both characters is the tragic and effectively traumatic experience both Tsotsi and Elizabeth share in common about their families. Tsotsi ran away from home at roughly the age of 8-10 and lived amongst the other orphan children in a series of abandoned contruction cylinders that he later revisits during the film. He left home after what seemed to be an alcoholic and aggressive father kicked and broke Tsotsi’s dog’s back. His mother had contracted HIV/AIDS, and Tsotsi was not allowed the closeness and affection from his mother for fear of also contracting the sickness.

This somewhat resembled the first ten pages of Elizabeth’s story of being born into a mixed ethnicity of black and white parents. When she was a child she was told her mother was crazy, an easily disturbing concept for any child to be told. But the fact that liz’s mother actually was locked up for reasons only explained as being “insane”, and then to be told to be careful or she could suffer the same fate. Well lets just say that’s the icing on what is easily a perfectly shaped cake full of crazy.

The rest of the film very loosely ties into with the book to me, but the film itself was a solid simple story of a young boy who grew up with a different kind of family, kids who were just like him. He had known Die Aap since he was a child and both have stuck together through every trouble making job, tsotsi also took in Boston after he dropped out of school, because he had raped a classmate, and now lived in the shacks. Butcher, who’s name easily describes his murderous attitude, was the loose cannon of the group but all of them to a degree had their own forms of Butcher in them. The problem with Butcher himself was that he had lost all notions of what Boston had called “decency”.

Don’t get me wrong it’s a great film with a wonderful setting but its also a shade down of the type of films I usually call awe-inspiring. And the violence isn’t really too bad at all, the film actually reminded me of another foreign-based film “City of god”, and its story of an individual named “rocket” and his place amidst a developing crime torn community in Brazil. I recommend that one to anyone who enjoyed Tsotsi.