Ray Pride

"Tsotsi," an adaptation of South African writer Athol Fugard's novel, an Academy Award-winner on Sunday night, is a showcase for two other bright talents: actor Presley Chweneyagae and writer-director Gavin Hood.

Set in a Johannesburg shantytown, Fugard's 1961 novel (only published in 1980) tells the story of a nameless, orphaned 19-year-old, known only as "Tsotsi," or "thug," who denies any trace of his past. In the movie's earliest moments, Tsotsi's angry present roils, and he and a trio of friends explode into violence; a carjacking lands a baby in Tsotsi's lap. Despite the chance for horrifying sentimentality, Hood's movie is an eye-opener, both visually and with Chweneyagae's intense performance, a compelling, suggestive story that's both lyrical and jagged. As he asserted with the Oscar in his hand, "Viva Africa!"

The South African director read the book while at UCLA studying film. "I thought, wow, this would really make a good movie whilst not realizing what a struggle it actually is. It's very much about what goes on in the mind of Tsotsi and the episodic nature of the characters he encounters. I put it out of my mind and went back to South Africa and started off making what we called educational dramas in the townships, making stories about HIV. And then I made a short film called "The Storekeeper," which won the Silver Hugo [in Chicago], and that helped get me finance for my first feature film."

There's a time-capsule quality to the novel's publication: Fugard wrote it in 1961 or so, tucked it away, and it wasn't published until 1980 or so. But the story is played both contemporary and timeless. In the shocking opening scenes, Hood almost uses Fugard's prose as storyboards, such as the tumult of weather, of lightning storms over Cape Town, in Fugard's words, "the torn and brooding sky." Still, his ending is more optimistic than his forebear's. "There are lots of reasons, one of which is that you want the audience to have something to discuss, and [if the more pessimistic ending were used] it's closed and there's nothing to discuss."

"With young writing students recently, I was asked, `How do you work the adaptation?' And I said if you think you have to turn the novel into the film, you get in trouble. What most people remember about a great piece of literature is how it made them feel. They remember the emotional response; they don't necessarily remember the damn plot six months later or even one week later. They remember that there was an emotion that it generated in them. What became my obligation was, can I capture that emotional essence and use different tools? No, I can't tell you what's going on in his head, but I can show you, without shifting the camera around a lot, what he's thinking if I have an actor and I work the beats out and I keep the eyelines tight-to-lens so you're really given the chance to look behind the eyes as opposed to being off-angle on the facial shots. I sometimes had them with their heads up against the lens if they weren't on camera. I'd be saying to you, play to this eye, so you're a flick away from the audience. So it's all what's happening in the eyes.

"And by the way? This kid has played Hamlet. This is a guy who comes from these areas, but from the age of 6, was going down to his community theater, community center where they did theater, and just loved it. And his mum wanted him to because it kept him off the streets. My costume director saw him playing Hamlet at the State Theater in a production, said this kid is unbelievable. So you have this actor who's capable of coming to grips with flawed characters, characters with a certain amount of self-loathing, vulnerability. My role was just to help him transition that from theater into the film medium and let him trust his moments of stillness."

Hood's dynamic use of widescreen is impressive as well. There's a cut he has from one child sheltering from the rain at night, nestled in a round cement culvert tile, and then you cut to the wider shot and there are so many more tiles, so many more kids, like a James Nachtwey photo of children playing in wartime. "Well, I'll tell you the weird thing. I have a stills background. I have the theater background because my parents were actors when they were young. But my dad's other passion was wildlife photography. Sometimes when I was young I hated it, because we'd be stuck in the heat in the car in the wilderness, waiting for some elephant to turn its head to catch the light just right in its eye. My father's point was always, the stills frame is about composition, lighting and grabbing an emotional moment. If you don't have that emotional moment, you just have a recording of something, you don't have a life, you don't have a soul. When you catch that moment, whatever it is, whether it be a lizard or an elephant or a human being that just catches you, that's what makes it."

"Tsotsi" opens Friday.

(2006-03-07)

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