CITY OF GOD (Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund, 2002)

A colorful and telling canvas about slum life in Rio de Janeiro, City of God (Cidade de Deus) has wasted little time in becoming an authentic classic of Brazilian cinema. The film admits numerous young characters, most of them distributed among different gangs over time, and a convoluted plot admitting elements of drug dealing, vicious criminal acts, and personal revenge. With nearly awesome flexibility and assurance, the directors of the film, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, have shaken their material loose from what has become its obligatory Italian neorealist formulation. Theirs is what might be called “fingertip cinema,” light, quick, as urgent as a rush of blood.

The City of God’s name encapsulates the hope of Rio’s impoverished blacks for social and economic ascension. It is a housing project, built in the 1960s, that by the 1980s has evolved into a swarming cesspool of teenaged (and younger) street violence. What had been a society’s dumping-ground for Rio’s homeless thus exposes, over time, a nation’s genuine lack of concern for its poor: the provision of shelter that politicians can self-flatteringly point to, but not the jobs that might sustain families and move their lots up the socioeconomic ladder. Like West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, 1961), City of God focuses on kids apart from their homes and parents—here, though, not as a sentimental device aimed at flattering young audiences, but as an expressive device exposing the hopelessness of youth. The generational handoff in this film isn’t from parents to offspring but from older gang to younger gang, as the former provides a model for upcoming gangs to emulate. Irony compounds irony, then, as kids cut themselves loose and are left to their own devices.

The film in particular follows two boys: Li’l Ze, who becomes a callous and powerful gangster, and Busca-Pé, too frail and sensitive for such a fate, who becomes a photographer—a variation on the Hollywood cliché wherein one kid becomes a gangster and the other a cop or a priest. It is Busca-Pé who narrates the film, his narrative moving from the 1980s back in time to the 1960s and 1970s. The film comes full circle, ending where it began, suggesting a Shakespearean instance of the cyclical nature of violence. One boy gets to photograph the other’s death—an act that may trigger his upward mobility in a society where violence sells. Busca-Pé notes that he won’t have to worry about Li’l Ze’s killing him anymore, but he will still have to worry about the police. Irony compounds irony compounds irony.

What a grab-bag of stylistic influences this film admits, with all of these coming from U.S. movies of the past fifteen years. The narration suggests Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990), and the wrap-around structure, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994); other moments show the influence of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999). Yet the film proceeds at such a rapid and assured pace that none of the borrowings separate out. Moreover, the film’s greatest coup, which goes well beyond considerations of style, owes its conception and force to silent Soviet cinema, in particular, Pudovkin. Early on, a very quick series of three shots notes the identical triangular roofs of the dismally tan attached units in the housing project; a little later, the camera pans to impress on us again this monotonous (let’s call it) building-scape. In subsequent shots, gang activity and warfare are shown in the streets against the backdrop of this building-scape. Thus associatively arises the film’s most potent and valuable, and original, idea, conveyed purely through visual means and montage: that a major impetus for the children’s violence pitting gang against gang is their overwhelming need to individuate themselves in a setting and a society that daily tries to crush them in a crucible of undifferentiated existence. From the outside, that is, our perspective, we see the mimesis, the extent to which their confrontations make the boys mirror images of one another, gang indististinguishable from gang. But City of God enables us to “view” the matter from the inside out, from the perspective of these children’s raw feelings of sameness and nothingness. This deepens our sense of their sense of futility, of lacking past and future and therefore cramming their whole existence into the present. Violence makes them feel different and alive, and this analysis blows the cliché of gang membership proceeding from a desire “to belong” out of the heavens. City of God allows us to see what we thought we had understood in a fresh, new and, for me, utterly convincing way—and one that doesn’t slander loving black parents and families in the way that the “old” explanation does.

The film, which was written by Bráulio Mantovani, is based on a novel by Paulo Lins; its exciting use of handheld camera, sweltering color cinematography by César Charlone, and rat-tat-tat cutting by Daniel Rezende erase all sense of literary origin. City of God is a film on the edge.

It has won a host of international prizes, as best film and for Meirelles (for whatever reason, the one credited director), the cinematographer and the editor.

It is not to be missed—and no one need do so fearing the film’s level of violence. The filmmakers show very little violence, actually, but convey fully, as artists, the violent nature of the lives these kids lead. Indeed, this film pretty well nails shut the coffin in which lie all the lies about how realism requires violence in order to convey violence—the tack only of either incompetents or those who mask their own insidious love of violence behind the empty proposition, “Well, I’m only showing you the way things are.” Artists show us without showing us because they understand that to be violent themselves defeats their implicit pleas against violence. I can’t begin to list the number of recent, especially U.S. films whose vicious, violent nature this film exposes and shames by its more subtle and infinitely more powerful method. Watching City of God is not an experience to dread; it’s a work of art—and that makes it something to celebrate.

BUS 174 (José Padilha, Felipe Lacerda, 2002)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Sandro do Nascimento never met his father. When he was six, robbers stabbed his hardworking mother to death before his eyes. On his own, Sandro survived the “unsolved” Candelária Massacre, in which probably off-duty police officers opened fire on homeless children in a makeshift outdoor shelter in front of a church. Thus Sandro lost a number of friends—another family. He robbed, to survive and to support a cocaine habit. Imprisoned in a filthy, teemingly overcrowded juvenile detention facility, the adolescent boy was starved and beaten. On June 12, 2000, armed with a gun loaded with a few bullets, Sandro hijacked a city bus and held its passengers hostage. At 18, he was one homeless youth who would be “invisible” no longer. Televised, the standoff between him and the police became a ratings hit, lasting a few hours. In camera view, Sandro’s life was foolproof against police assassination. Eventually, though, he left his safety zone, with one hostage in tow. Out of camera range, intending to shoot Sandro, the police are likely the ones who shot and killed his young hostage instead. The police had done what they were supposed to do: catch Sandro do Nascimento alive. However, in the police wagon en route to the station, they suffocated him. Rio de Janeiro rejoiced when Sandro’s murderers were acquitted at trial.
     José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda’s Brazilian documentary begins with an aerial shot traversing water, shore, moneyed mansions and, on the other side of a hill, Rocinha, a teemingly overcrowded, vast favela—the juxtaposition of rich and poor, in a single sweeping shot. The bus footage is woven into contextualizing interviews, including the film’s zenith, in photographic negative a passage about other detainees in Sandro’s prison—a “hell-hole,” one guard calls it.
     Ônibus 174 makes the invisible visible.

NDEYSAAN (Mansour Sora Wade, 2002)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

According to Senegalese filmmaker Mansour Sora Wade, Ndeysaan reflects his position that “belief [in the supernatural] and pragmatism co-exist naturally.” Contemporary Africa will drown if it drifts too far from its tribal past.
     In a pre-colonial coastal village, waves of fog roll in, keeping fishermen out of the water and thus imperiling the village’s existence. Two best friends love the same woman, beauteous, dignified Maxoye, who loves only Mbanick. Mbanick is the son of the village marabount. In a trance, Mbanick fells the tree under which his father is buried, carving a canoe from the trunk, taking it to sea, disappearing into the heart of the fog. When he emerges, it is with a treasure: the countless fish that he caught. Mbanick now not only has Maxoye but everyone’s respect and gratitude for conquering the fog and saving the village. One night, at sea, Yatma, jealous, kills his friend, whose dying vow promises revenge. Maxoye, pregnant with Mbanick’s son, marries Yatma, knowing he murdered her beloved. The “price of forgiveness” is that theirs will be an unconsummated union and Yatma will have to raise his victim’s son, also named Mbanick. While Maxoye eventually relents and the couple have a child of their own, the sea exacts its own price. In effect, the sea’s forgiveness requires the forfeit of all our lives—and the tale’s survival.
     As the tree falls in slow motion, villagers appear as a procession of phantoms—ghosts of the past, but also the ghosts the villagers will one day be.
     Analytical and gorgeous, rigorous and haunting, Ndeysaan is narrated by an old man, the son of a griot. He prophesies the end of the African oral folk tradition. At the same time, the film itself underscores cinema’s capacity to keep the past, tradition, and hope alive.

THE NAMESAKE (Mira Nair, 2006)

Adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, Mira Nair’s The Namesake is further proof that the maker of Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Monsoon Wedding (2002) has nothing of value to contribute to cinema. Poorly acted, and eerily populated by ugly guys and pretty gals, a contrived tearjerker is what Nair serves up.
     For all its insistence to the contrary, The Namesake doesn’t explore in any rigorous way the generational/ethno-identity divide between a Bengal couple, U.S. immigrants, and their U.S.-born offspring. Nor does the disruption of the wife/mother’s singing aspirations, coupled with her nostalgia for her homeland, render the situation any more complex. Everything in this film is either facile or presented in a facile manner. The United States, it would appear, has turned the lives of the Gangulis into bargain-basement soap opera.
     The protagonist is the son, Gogol, named for his father’s favorite Russian author. Understandably, Gogol isn’t happy with his name and eventually changes it; but his father has a special reason for having named his son Gogol, and right before having a massive heart attack he discloses it to his son privately. This is one of the film’s tearjerking moments, and it is typical of Nair’s corruption and puny gifts. Rather than presenting her material fairly and honestly, Nair withholds the revelation until she can pounce on us with it and wallop our tender hearts. It is no excuse for such rank manipulation that she is following the book’s narrative structure, if indeed that is what she is doing. (I have not read the novel, although I have read Lahiri’s short stories in Interpreter of Maladies.) Two wrongs don’t make a right.
     The Namesake is not without its engaging moments, especially when Gogol brings his non-Indian girlfriend home for dinner. But these are not enough.