So much said in a stare

Tsotsi, AKA David is a young man who is going through an awakening of his soul and conscience and all throughout the movie I am having an internal conflict as to whether I should feel sorry for him or hate him for being so selfish.

The movie starts and ends with an intense look from our main character Tsotsi that sends shivers up and down ones spine but for two very drastic reasons. 

 

In the beginning, Tsotsi is a hardened criminal.  He had a rough life that we really only catch a glimpse of in flashbacks.  He mother was very ill and died while he was young.  His father was a drunk who killed his dog.  In that one fateful evening when his mother was so sick and his father so drunk Tsotsi runs away.  He lives on the streets and learns to survive by whatever means necessary.  He starts to hustle, get in with bad groups and starts to rob, cheat, steal and in some cases murder.  When we first meet Tsotsi he is a young man who is in deep with the gangs.  He has this look of hate, pain, envy, greed and craziness in his eyes as he is looking for his next victim in the bus station.  Once he and his fellow gangbangers find their victim they corner him on the bus.  They rob him and one of the thugs ends up stabbing and killing the guy.

They take off running to a bar.  As they sit there one of the thugs, Boston, who is actually educated, is bothered by the killing.  He starts to talk about decency and where was everyone’s decency if murdering a person was done with no remorse or guilt.  After all, they got what they came for; the killing of this man happened afterward and not necessary. 

All through out Boston’s soliloquy you see Tsotsi staring.  His eyes are still enraged yet you see something change in him ever so slightly.  He now looks bothered and agitated by what Boston is saying.  It is as if it hits someplace close to him and he starts to question his own morality.  All this time he justifies his actions as a way to survive.  Everyone else left him, treated him like crap or never showed an ounce of concern for his well being so he never really had much base for morals.  His motivation was for survival by what ever means evolved into more and more greed.  Now Boston’s words confront him and his lack of morals.  This makes him rather upset.  He beats Boston up severely. 

Tsotsi takes off running.  He enters into a neighborhood that is better off than his shanty town.  It is raining out and a woman pulls into her home but the gate to her garage is not working.  She get s out of the car to ring her the buzzer so her husband can come and get her. 

**SPOIL ALERT**SPOIL ALERT** DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER**

Tsotsi see’s her and decides that he is going to carjack her.  In the process he ends up shooting the woman and the in the long run she ends up paralyzed.

Tsotsi drives the car to a wide open and vacant area.  As he is set to leave the car he hears a cry of a baby.  Unknown to him while he was carjacking this woman, he did not know there was a baby in the car.  Everything that Boston said earlier that evening was coming back to haunt him.  Where was his decency?  Would he go back and get the baby or leave the baby stranded in that car with very little possibility for its survival?

Tsotsi ends up taking the baby with him.  He is no way prepared to take care of a baby but it seems as if there is a deeper moral and selfish obligation that is driving his decisions now.

I got a sense in the movie that Tsotsi, more than anything else wanted to keep that child and take care of it.  At first the decision might have been driven by not wanting to get caught but it developed into something more.  It was as if he wanted to take care of that child in a way he thought his own parents should have taken care of him.  He wanted to prove to himself and to everyone else who looked at him as a poor excuse for a human; a low life thug, that he was capable of having more depth and responsibility than just following the moral code of the streets.  He wanted to prove to Boston and others that he did have decency.  For the rest of the movie you see Tsotsi force his way into peoples lives in the typical thuggish ways but they all had the purpose now of helping this baby. 

In the end, Tsotsi sees outside himself.  He realizes that he is not capable of taking care of this child.  He also realizes that the child has two very loving and capable parents, something he never had.  He takes this and realizes that he will never be able to offer the emotional support and stability that he lacked in his own upbringing.  In the end, he sacrifices himself in order to return the baby to his parents.  In this exchange we are brought back to a very intense stare from Tsotsi but something is very different than from the beginning of the movie; this time there is compassion, humility, honor, dignity that are shining through the pain and the tears.   It is at this point I realize he learned to not be selfish but to be humble and accept that a person can not change their past but they have complete control of their future.