Demob Happy

Re-birth of a Rainbow Nation?

8/10

Based on a novel by South African playwright Athol Fugard, ‘Tsotsi‘ a slickly-produced, powerful drama set in a giant township outside Johannesburg. Presley Chweneyagae stars as the eponymous Tsotsi, a baby-faced assassin forced into surrogate fatherhood by the baby he unwittingly kidnaps during a bungled car jacking. Protecting the baby thus forces Tsotsi to examine his behaviour in the light of his own lost childhood, darkened by the death of his mother to AIDS and an abusive father.

‘Tsotsi’ is an apocalyptic but highly stylised vision of township blight, all brewing storm clouds and hyper-real colours. Large, prominent AIDS/HIV posters feature in several shots, adding to a mood of impending catastrophe as ominously as the punctuating lightening bolts and thunderclaps. The style, very much informed by hip hop video culture - or at least a hybrid South African version of it - brings to mind Mathieu Kassovitz’s ‘La Haine‘, the camera in the initial sequences bouncing to booty-shaking Kwaito basslines. While the sets seem studio-engineered rather than shot on location, the visual slickness is offset by unselfconsciously naturalistic performances.

By focusing on black South Africa, both rich and poor - there is scarcely a white face in the film - ‘Tsotsi’ deals less with the legacy of Apartheid and more with issues of poverty, personal responsibility, penetance, and the impact of broken families on their children. This latter aspect, especially that caused by the global AIDS epidemic, makes ‘Tsotsi’ universal without resorting to explicit political finger-pointing. While the root causes of AIDS are not explored, one of its consequences is - the resulting breakdown of the family unit and its impact on social dysfunction.

Above all, ‘Tsotsi’ is a simple and moving story about boys forced to be men by their circumstances, which is why Presley Chweneyagae is so perfect in the lead role: his soft, benign features belying a life of pain. Despite the apparently downbeat conclusion, there is a subtler note of optimism, that the young men of the townships can nurture the next generation in the most difficult circumstances, that they can learn from their experiences and do the right thing.