S. AFRICA'S 'TSOTSI' SHINES A LIGHT ON CLASS DIFFERENCES.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

WHAT A difference good storytelling makes.

Last week's Hollywood movie involving a carjacked child, ``Freedomland,'' was a melodramatic mess that fumbled every psychological, racial and class observation it clumsily tried to make.

This week's Oscar-nominated, South African movie involving a carjacked child, ``Tsotsi,'' is an involving character study marked by acute psychological insight, exceptional understanding of class differences and - somewhat shocking, considering both its national and authorial origins - virtually no overt racial conflict.

There is, of course, an implicit criticism of South Africa's long history of unequal economic opportunity at the core of the piece. Based on the only novel written by the nation's premier playwright, Athol Fugard, ``Tsotsi'' has been updated from the book's 1950s setting to the Johannesburg shantytowns of today by adapter-director Gavin Hood. As in most of his great plays, apartheid was a central element of Fugard's novel. It says volumes that the hard-to-please author has praised its excision from the film, along with other liberties Hood has taken with the material. Sharp human and cultural observations replace the missing politics.

The title bears multiple meanings. It's a township term for local thugs, and part of the name of the mixed language argot in which they speak, Tsotsi-Taal. Finally, Tsotsi is also the name of the film's lead character, a brutal teenage criminal whose sentimental education plays out anything but sentimental in its theatrical presentation.

Chillingly yet compellingly played by Presley Chweneyagae, whose only previous acting experience has been in school plays and community theater, Tsotsi is the long-orphaned leader of a small ghetto gang. He has a dangerous temper (he really messes up a buddy who makes him think about his childhood) and ruthless criminal attitude, and apparently no capacity for tenderness whatsoever.

After he steals a well-off (and, different from the novel, black) suburban woman's luxury car, Tsotsi discovers her 3-month-old baby in the back seat. Not knowing what to do, he slips the infant into his one-room shack, improvises diapers and tries to keep the flies off the tot, and is terrified of letting anyone, even his crew, know it's there. His crime has swiftly triggered a tabloid-fueled manhunt.

Tsotsi soon realizes that he can't take care of his charge, though, and forces a neighboring single mother, Miriam (Terry Pheto), to secretly help with the parenting. Predictably enough, Miriam's nurturing of the baby and, by extension, its gangster guardian doesn't so much melt Tsotsi's heart as point him in a direction to locate it. And while his every, um, professional instinct has Tsotsi thinking along ransom lines, guilt and his own strange, new paternal feelings render him increasingly vulnerable and confused.

You can see how drippy this all could have turned out. Very occasionally, it kind of gets that way. But, for the most part, Hood keeps the story sharpened to a hard, violent edge, right up to Tsotsi's climactic moment of truth. The whole thing is powered by a kicking soundtrack of Kwaito, the townships' tough, angry dance music form (Zola, one of the genre's superstars, plays a kind of crime boss in the film). And the details of township life, in all their violence and quotidian drudgery and bursts of lost child playfulness, ring persuasively true.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

TSOTSI - Three stars

(R: violence, children in jeopardy, language, substance abuse)

Starring: Presley Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto, Zola.

Director: Gavin Hood.

Running time: 1 hr. 34 min.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; Century 15, Century City; NuWilshire, Santa Monica; South Coast Village 3, Costa Mesa.

In a nutshell: Riveting tale of a teenage South African thug who grows a conscience when he's forced to care for a carjacked baby. In Tsotsi-Taal with English subtitles.