Motherly love at gunpoint

Few Oscar-winners for Best Foreign Language Film are really worth the title, largely because each country chooses its entrant with some caution, knowing the conservative nature of the American Academy.

Gavin Hood's Tsotsi is no exception. Put against The Beat My Heart Skipped or Hidden, neither of which superior French movies were nominated, it seems a strikingly made but essentially one-paced and melodramatic tale.

Its protagonist, Tsotsi (or "Thug"), is a vicious young, black criminal, born in a shanty town near Johannesburg, who is redeemed not by the love of a woman but by the baby he inadvertently kidnaps. The three-month-old infant is on the back seat of a car that Tsotsi hijacks from a prosperous suburb after shooting the driver, the baby's mother.

He crashes the car and, inexplicably, since he knows the police are after him and would have soon found the child, he takes the baby with him in a bag.

Once there, he tells none of the gang he leads, clumsily changes the baby's nappies, feeds it condensed milk from a tin and then, when the crying doesn't cease, decides to follow a young seamstress with her own child and force her to breastfeed the infant at gunpoint.

Gradually, however, a sort of relationship grows between the two young people and the baby. The redemption begins. The more violence that Tsotsi and his friends perpetrate, the less he likes it. There's a spark in him that hints at better things, though quite how he can achieve them in these circumstances is a matter of doubt.

Based on a story by Athol Fugard, one of South Africa's great writers, the film has a performance from Presley Chweneyagae as Tsotsi which admirably suggests a feckless little gangster who nevertheless seems to know he is making a gigantic mess of his life. Terry Pheto as the seamstress, whose husband has been the victim of violent crime, is also excellent, even though her part is badly underdeveloped.

But what the film misses is Fugard's sure sense of the baleful influence of apartheid. In updating the story to the present, something has been left out.

Even so, Hood's often violent portrait of a crime-ridden South Africa is much aided by good casting of the minor parts and photography from Lance Gewer that emphasises both the beauty and squalor of the settings. The music, too, featuring the voice of Vusi Mahlasela, adds to the atmosphere.

But we learn little or nothing about Tsotsi, even though an unhappy and difficult past is hinted at, and we simply have to take too much on trust. If this is a breakthrough film for South Africa, where it has proved a big success, it is hardly much more than that.

Tsotsi
Cert: 15