Tsotsi 2005 South Africa, Gavin Hood.
Tsotsi is the second film this year to remind me of Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. The first was V for Vendetta, which appropriates Maria Falconetti's iconic shaved head for Natalie Portman's torture/imprisonment scenes. It's an empty citation that adds little to the film — a superficial echo of a much deeper, much more satisfying work. Tsotsi, on the other hand, pays homage to the humanism that makes The Passion of Joan of Arc every bit as immediate, as effective today as it was 80 years ago.
Like Dreyer, director Gavin Hood lingers on the faces of his actors. The screen is given over to the baby David for ten, fifteen seconds at a time. It is filled with close-ups of Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae): first hard and cruel, then conflicted, and finally shattered, broken. Hood knows that we are social creatures, attuned to the slightest facial tick, to minute changes in body language. He knows that our paternal and maternal instincts are awakened by a helpless, cooing baby, that our fraternal instincts respond to a fellow human being in the throes of a moral crisis. So he relies on these faces to succinctly express complex emotions that pages of clumsy dialogue cannot.
David Edelstein correctly predicted that Tsotsi would win this year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. He described the "perfect" contender as a film that starts out foreign: the audience says, "What's this language? Where am I? I can only handle so much foreignness!" But then a recognizable Hollywood formula emerges and the audience yells, "That's me up there!" It's a sound analysis, one that applies to Tsotsi in many respects. There is a rogue's gallery of thugs with names like Butcher and Boston (also Teacher Man). There is a hardened criminal who is tamed by a woman and by the responsibilities of parenthood. But Tsotsi's humanism, its restraint are not learned from Hollywood. And these, ultimately, are the reasons it is successful.
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