Friday 9 December 2011

Tsotsi

2005 by Gavin Hood - Afrikaans movie from South Africa

In 2008, there was a Malayalam movie Mulla, which inspite of having a brilliant thread to begin with, ended up as a pretty average movie. I was told by somebody then that it looked like an inspiration of some foreign movie. He could not recollect the name then.

Watching Tsotsi, everything is quite clear. Mulla had picked up the basic thread of the story, a small time criminal   having to parent a baby. In Tsotsi, it is a small time criminal who has to look after the baby, after finding the baby in the back seat of a car, he just stealed. Mulla, picked up the thread and built a whole lot of typical Indian masala around it.

Tsotsi simply is about a bad guy having to take care of the baby and slowly realising the importance of parenting.

It is told very beautifully. How this bad guy turns out to be a caring father is so nicely communicated to the viewer and cinematically it is excellent. I would also say it was really nice that the end didnt had any serious blood shed. It stops quite differently, when we start to guess a routine end to such a character.