The first movie was titled "Tsotsi" (meaning "Thug"), an Academy Award (2005) and Golden Globe Award (2006) winner set in Soweto, Johannesburg. The first third of the movie we watched, before a glitch in our copy caused us to abandon it, showed a gang of four thugs leave their shantytown, go to the city and mug a man, stabbing and killing him in the process. The main character, who is known only as Tsotsi/Thug, goes on to rob a vehicle, throwing a woman out of it and shooting her, then driving away before he realizes that her tiny infant is in the backseat. It was at this point, at the hight of the movie's tension, that our copy flubbed.
Unable to simply call it a night, we opted to go on to our second movie, a Japanese drama-romance titled "Be with You". The opening scene proved that it would be in somber contrast to Tsotsi. The film features a family of two--a father and son--a year after the wife/mother, Mio, had died. The movie shows the two struggling at everyday tasks; the father clearly in over his head with career, housework and child. The son son is good-natured and understanding though, and when the father apologizes for the terrible tasting dinner he prepared, the son declares the goop tastes great. After that, things get weird when at the start of the rainy season, the dead Mio somehow returns to earth. She has no memory, but falls back in love with her husband and son and begins to do the housework almost immediately. The movie, at this point, transforms into a mystery, drumming up questions less to do with how this is possible, but why it is happening. During the month-long rainy season ends, the reason is slowly revealed; we find out that Mio had discovered her destiny many years before her death, and all of this had been written in the stars, so to speak. The wife says good-bye and vanishes back into the afterlife, leaving the father and son reassured of her love and giving them closure.
After "Be with You" finished, we were both feeling somewhat dumbfounded. Although we were told the movie was a tear-jerker, we simply sat on the sofa blinking our dry eyes. Although we could accept the general arc of the storyline, I had lots of questions for the screenwriter, not least of which: From what hell had Mio returned to want to spend her last month on earth folding laundry?! But in Japan, such questions are likely left unanswered.
The next day we resumed "Tsotsi". The young thug decides to keep the baby and care for it. Unsurprisingly, he does a terrible job of it--changing the baby's diapers with old newspaper and leaving the baby in a paper bag with an open can of condensed milk which results in an insect attach. But Tsotsi manages to recruit a local single-mother (at gunpoint) to clean up and breastfeed the infant. Through caring for the baby, though, Tsotsi is somehow transformed by the presence of this innocent baby; a point that is subtly underlined since the baby is soothed whenever Tsotsi cradles him. In the end, however, justice is served. Tsotsi decides to return the infant to his father and now-wheelchair-bound mother and turn himself in. The grieving family may now start to heal, and they even show some understanding of Tsotsi's transformation, ordering the police not to shoot him. But Tsotsi's transformation is proved to the viewer when he shows the police no resistance, putting his arms in the air, surrendering less to them and more to heaven.
Posts
