Unforgettable
Tsotsi is gorgeous, riveting, poignant, and thrilling. Not only is it a first-rate piece of storytelling, but it also takes the viewer into a world of South African poverty and crime that he has never seen before. Director/writer Gavin Hood offers us a tale of tragic redemption and uncommon poetry in a subculture of the most abject immorality. Truly unforgettable.
The only work in recent times to which this movie can be compared is City of God. There, too, the viewer is brought into a world of poverty and crime he probably never knew existed. It is a world so bleak that it forces the viewer to examine his own morality and wonder how much of the civility he takes for granted in his life is merely the luxury of the well fed and comfortable. These characters live on the edge and their primary passion is survival.
What makes Tsotsi, in the end, a finer film than City of God is that it offers a more complex sense of hope; it reminds us in an honest and unsentimental way that inside even the hardest cases there is a soul, which is never beyond redemption
