Film Review

Tsotsi

  By Junius

  Tsotsi, which means “thug,” got the Best Foreign Film award at the Oscars this year. The Academy must be a bunch of very sensitive folk; behind the murderer they can feel for the abused boy who—but wait, I didn’t see any actual abuse in the flashback that was supposed to explain the protagonist’s criminality. His father abused the dog; the Academy deduced the rest, that the boy is so hurt that he becomes the most pitiless gang leader in his part of the Johannesburg townships. Perhaps the Academy was aided by the fact that the punk didn’t really look the part, looked a bit soft in fact, with a face that the Academy might well feel would lead them to a heart of gold.

Tsotsi is a bit of a terror as the film opens, but hold on. The woman whose car he is stealing and whom he shoots in the belly before he drives off, made the mistake of leaving her baby in the back seat. The Academy can see it coming now. The baby will bond with the baby, and the brute will capitulate.

The Academy apparently likes crime to be psychologically reassuring; criminality is something that a good plot can dissolve. They must have closed their eyes to what crime really is, what was shown as the film took us across the stagnant river into the Johannesburg slums, perhaps too reminiscent of what south Los Angeles looks like from Beverley Hills. Of course, criminals have different personalities, but the one overriding factor is the gross inequality in societies. Property crime is a clumsy, vicious, and egotistically shortsighted attempt at redistribution of wealth, one that merely fills the jails rather than mans the barricades. The well-to-do naturally prefer crime to revolution, and the movie industry is happy to keep us focussed on crime for obvious reasons: the complexities of criminal neuroses are dramatic.

The healthiest nations are ones where there is not an extreme range of wealth, but where most people can shake hands. The Academy is bored by such commonsense considerations. They want the excitement of “Will he give the baby back to the mother, who is now in a wheelchair?” Of course he will, because he’s changed; he changed before our eyes.

And even the post-apartheid cops—something’s got into them, too. They don’t mow the guy down after he’s handed over the baby. The Academy must have been touched by that.