72. South African filmmaker Gavin Hood’s film “Tsotsi” (Thug) (2005): Adaptation of an important African novel on redemption and self discovery

The film is an adaptation of the acclaimed anti-apartheid playwright Irish/South African Athol Fugard’s novel Tsotsi. Director Gavin Hood wrote the screenplay based on the novel. The film was a critical success winning the best foreign film Oscar along with other awards at film festivals around the world.

Athol Fugard was called “the greatest active playwright in the English speaking world” by Time magazine in 1985. Why he chose to write Tsotsi as a novel and not a play intrigues me—and why Fugard did not write the screenplay of the film intrigues me even more. An article by Andie Miller “From words into pictures” quoting Fugard gives a clue: D.W. Griffith once described film making as the ability to photograph thought, and novels, with their interior monologues, Fugard agrees, make for better adaptations than plays. This is perhaps part of the reason why the film of Tsotsi works so well.

Gavin Hood’s screenplay is a mix of English and “tsotsitaal” (thug language of Soweto). The final product was a modern day adaptation of the novel set in 1958. And it appears that Fugard was happy with Hood’s film.

The story of the film Tsotsi revolves around a car-jacking by a black South African thug. He steals an up-market sedan from a rich back lady driving it. The woman is wounded in the skirmish and the thug drives off with the car with an infant, unintentionally kidnapped, lying in the back seat. Fugard’s novel and Hood’s film explore the subsequent changes on the thug’s life as he matures into a responsible foster parent, as he re-evaluates his own attitudes to women, and his growing empathy for the infant’s parents. Racial issues take a back seat, as sociological and psychological changes in the lead character dominate the film’s theme. Sit back and reflect—the story need not be set in Soweto, it could happen anywhere.

The strength of Hood’s film is the ability to “externalize the internalization” as Jean Paul Sartre would have put it were he to write this review. Tsotsi’s star Presley Chweneyagae who was playing his first film role has very few words to speak but the film captures each detail of his emotions, with lots of close-up shots. You come out of the movie thinking that there was a lot spoken, but you realize it was an illusion. All the other characters talk but the main character spoke very little, but his body “spoke” a lot. Now that’s interesting cinema.

Fugard/Hood uses a crippled beggar as a pivotal point for a change of heart in a thug who does not seem to know what "decency" means. He kills without reason and cannot accept criticism. The broken legs of a beggar remind the thug of the dog with its backbone broken by the thug's cruel father. Asked by the thug, how the cripple continues to live like this, he gets the answer "Because I like the sun on my face!" This conversation leads to a gradual evolution from heartlessness to the actions of a "decent" human being. Towards the end of the film he removes his dark jacket, only to wear a white shirt, a weak symbolic action the director could have avoided.

The entire film uses actors from South Africa and the film can boast of high standards in production quality. The obvious comparison of the ghettos with the posh housing colonies remind you of the comparison made by the Hungarian director Geza von Redvanyi’s remarkable 1965 European film Onkel Toms Hütte (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) which showed Manhattan’s skyscrapers before flashing back several decades to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s story that throw a socio-economic perspective to the respective stories for the perceptive viewer.

Director Gavin Hood has drifted into film direction after a stint as a lawyer and then as an actor. Tsotsi is his third film as a director. He evidently grappled with three different endings of the film: one where the lead character is shot dead, one where he escapes, and a third where he surrenders to the police with the parents of the infant supporting Tsotsi. Each option would provide a definite perspective to the final product. To Hood’s credit, the option that he chose is the most interesting one, and one that makes the viewer think.

The film does not glamorize violence and yet provides some top notch sequences such as the robbing of a rich man on a commuter train, the forced breastfeeding of the infant at the point of a gun, or the communication between a crippled beggar and a thug, all of which could match the best films from Hollywood. The film encapsulates the concerns of Africa, orphans seduced into the world of crime and the tenuous family linkages in a modern world where owning material goods become the dreams of poor yet essentially lovely individuals. Hundreds of parents die each day in Africa, some from AIDS, some from other causes, leaving behind potential Tsotsies to populate the skyline. Fugard and Hood underline one statement: under the veneer of each undesirable human being lies a streak of goodness. Only circumstances can bring those streaks of goodness to the fore.

P.S. Director Mark Dornford-May's South African film U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha (2005) was reviewed earlier on this blog.

54. Chadean filmmaker Mahamet-Saleh Haroun's "Daratt (Dry Season)" (2006): Beyond the tooth for a tooth, eye for an eye equation

There are a handful of films from Africa that can leap out like a big cat from the celluloid jungle and make the viewer think.

A recent example is Daratt (Dry Season), a movie from Chad, a Central African country that was initially economically weakened by the French colonial rule and later, after gaining independence, slumped into a 40-year-old civil war. The neighboring Darfur crisis and the resulting spillover of refugees have not ameliorated the political and economic situation of this landlocked country. Imagine living in a country that is dusty and hot with the Sahara desert to its north. Imagine living in a country where two generations of its population have not encountered peace or progress but live under the constant shadow of fear and corruption. If you can empathize with the unusually inhospitable situation, you will realize the title of the film is not merely a reflection of the hot, dusty climate, but a metaphor to describe life in Chad today.

This film is a powerful mix of metaphors and fables. The atmosphere captured in the film is real. People still get their news on the radio—not on TV or by reading newspapers. People still eat freshly baked sticks of French bread. People still carry guns that often can compare with the best anywhere in the world, quite in contrast to what else is available. The younger generation includes street-smart crooks and quiet, hardworking young men yearning for normal family bonds and affection that the civil war did not allow to grow. When the young man, a fascinating study of conrolled aggression, is asked by a baker what he wants, he answers laconically—“Not charity.” Today, what Chad requires most is not charity as well, but honest, hard work that will build the nation.

What is unreal in the film? Corruption that eats into the soul of Chad is never glimpsed save for petty thieves selling fluorescent lights stolen from semi-dark streets in the night. What the viewer sees is a baker baking fresh bread and distributing it free to young hungry boys (the entire film suggests that young girls are an endangered species!). Now why would a person do this? Is the baker so rich that charity has become his vocation? It is possible that any scene of money changing hands for the baker’s bread got lopped off on the editing floor because another baker is later shown providing aggressive competition. Terror is never shown on screen save for slippers left behind by crowds that apparently fled in terror.

What are the metaphors in the film? A “blind” grandfather seeks revenge after a radio broadcast proclaims amnesty for the perpetrators of the horrors. The blind man hands a gun to his grandson, now an orphan called Atim (metaphorically meaning an orphan) to avenge the death of his parents by killing a certain individual in a far away city. This perpetrator of crimes, now a symbol of reconciliation, hard work and progress has lost his “voice” and can only speak with artificial aids. Yet he is the one with a kind heart, wanting to adopt a hardworking son, and keeps his armory of weapons well hidden.

The “good” men who seek revenge are blind. The “bad” men who seek reconciliation, normalcy and family life can’t speak (literally and metaphorically). And both men are devout Muslims. That’s Chad today!

The final outcome of the film is easily played out for the viewer because of these physical constraints of the two men. The outcome is easily played out as social mores are not tampered with—the grandfather’s command is seemingly obeyed. The “father’s” love for the “son” is acknowledged.

It would be too simplistic to draw parallels between Daratt and Argentine/Chilean Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the maiden, later adapted for the screen by American novelist Rafael Yglesias for Polish director Roman Polanski. Yglesais' and Polanski's ambiguous final scene in their film Death and the Maiden, where principal players exchange meaningful glances, is a delight.

In total contrast, Dry Season’s final scene is not of individuals but of the dry environment, as the camera zooms out. The viewer is nudged by the director to see the larger picture of the film, not the bare story line. What Polanski and Yglesias did in an American/European film, Mahamet-Saleh Haroun has equaled with ambiguity and force rarely seen in Africa cinema. Will the dry season accept a world of reconciliation that will lead to rain (a metaphoric wet season) and prosperity for future generations indoctrinated in love and traditional values? Perhaps, it will. Perhaps, not.

Dry Season won the 2007 Venice Film Festival's Grand Special Jury Prize and four other minor awards at the event.

Moolaade (Senegal), U–Carmen e Khayelitsha (South Africa), and In Casablanca, angels don’t fly (Morocco) (all three reviewed earlier on this blog) are three examples of mature works of recent African cinema, with its distinct African aesthetics, that transect the length and breadth of the vast continent and capture the tragedy and aspirations of its people. I am delighted to add Dry Season to my list of formidable contemporary African cinema.