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Ashland, Oregon HOME Valley & State Sports Nation & World Opinion/Editorial Classifieds Business Columnists Local Issues Obituaries Weather Archive Revels Etcetera Backpage Hot Topics Most Viewed Forum Photo Galleries Video Readers Polls O-Zone Online Games Movie Preview Special Sections Real Estate Guide Menu Guide Shakespeare Subscribe Contact Us Rate Card Place an Ad May 20, 2006 ‘Tsotsi’ offers riveting filmmaking at its best By Chris Honore’ Ashland Daily Tidings The Oscar winning “Tsotsi” (pronounced sut-see) is riveting filmmaking. Based on a novel by Athol Fugard, it tells a story that gradually envelopes and then touches the audience. Initially, the film introduces the audience to a small gang of thugs sitting in an open-air bar playing dice. Stretching in all directions are the flimsy and decaying shacks of a vast shantytown on the edge of Johannesburg, South Africa. Poverty is an anvil, it’s weight unimaginable. The distance between the lives of the people seen on the screen, walking along the trash-strewn streets, standing in line to fill a container of water, and those watching in the cool theater is light years in time and travel. But there it is. Tsotsi, the leader of the gang, tiring of throwing the dice, decides that it’s time for another job. So they make their way into Johannesburg and to the underground subway, all the while looking for a victim. These are ruthless predators, none older than twenty, remorseless and intent on taking what they want. Spotting an elderly man in the station, they follow him onto a train where they brutally stab him and take his money. It is a violent scene that establishes without equivocation that these young men are willing to do whatever they deem necessary without hesitation or remorse. What happens next is both unexpected and indeed frames the rest of the film. Tsotsi, now alone, carjacks a woman’s car while she is standing in the rain trying to get the home security gate open so she can drive through. While she is out of the car, the motor running, the lights bright in the darkness, Tsotsi jumps into the driver’s seat and takes off. It is a seminal moment in the film for that one act will change the rest of his life. The film now becomes a tale about personal insight and change, and asks the question whether redemption is ever possible for those whose souls are desiccated by their experiences, who have shut down all the corridors of feeling, willing themselves to never weigh who they are and what they are about. We watch as Tsotsi’s defenses are stripped away and his humanity begins to emerge. What gives the film strength and verisimilitude is that this doesn’t occur because of one altering epiphany; rather, Tsotsi struggles and wages a war against himself, resisting emotions that are subtle and incremental but nevertheless powerful. Never is “Tsotsi” sentimental, or maudlin. It is straightforward in its suggestion that redemption is possible and can transform. But the film also asks the question: what happens to the human spirit if those new understandings come too late, if what is revealed comes at a moment when that which has been done cannot be undone and so the character stands with this new truth, powerless to make use of it, or to live a life whose promise is only just revealed, but can never be fulfilled? --> Copyright © 2006 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers. All Rights Reserved.