Rent Tsotsi (2005)

life on the edge - Tsotsi review by CP Customer

After waiting a few months, I was not disappointed. The tale of South African Ghetto life was grim but realistic, and the emotional rollercoaster of the principal character was well acted. Rent it now!

Said It All With His Face - Tsotsi review by griggs

Give a violent man a baby and wait for his conscience to clock in — it's one of the oldest tricks in the book, and somehow Tsotsi still pulls it off.

Chweneyagae is doing the heavy work here. He starts out coldly frightening, all clenched jaw and locked-off stare, then lets the humanity leak through so slowly you barely notice it happening. Terry Pheto matches him as Miriam — warm, but never a saint about it, and her wariness keeps things from turning soft too early.

I could see most of the redemption coming a mile off. The film ticks its redemption boxes almost audibly, helped by a score that occasionally elbows you towards the required emotion. The childhood flashbacks weren't needed either; Chweneyagae had already said it all with his face.

The film's township setting gives the whole thing some backbone, and at ninety-odd minutes it doesn't hang about. Predictable and a touch sentimental, but Chweneyagae makes a redemption arc I could see coming from miles away feel worth following.

Raw - Tsotsi review by CH

Any plot can sound implausible in summary (think of Hamlet) and so it would be of Tsotsi. A young hoodlum, Presley Chweneyagae, from a ghetto gang treats killing much as anybody else would a business expense (a body is left behind on a train floor in exchange for the dead man's wallet). So it goes on until a carjacking outside a hefty gate. After the owner is abandoned, shot in the legs, he finds her baby lodged on the back seat. Had he duly decided to return the nappied child, there would be no plot. He follows a different impulse, using violence to persuade a woman to breast feed this baby as well as her own .

The action, and action there is in bloody plenty, takes place in a short time, with police on the trail, and, along with punishment, aspires to the redemption. which gives this film its complexity. Filmed with bravura, inside and out (the capital glimped as a backdrop to the glorified huts of a township), it ends with as fraught an encounter as the one in that bleak Elsinore castle. And leaves one to marvel at the very playing of all concerned, for man cannot live by cinematography alone.