(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2003)
The
favourite for this year’s Oscar for best foreign film must be the Brazilian City of God, directed by Fernando
Meireilles. It helps its chances a lot that Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her is ineligible because its
home country, Spain, didn’t submit it for consideration. Still, City of God would be a worthy winner of
the award. It’s a film of enormous skill and scope, fusing serious purpose with
canny entertainment values. And it marks yet another step forward in the
amazing advance of South American cinema.
City of God
The “city
of God” is a hellish slum in Rio de Janeiros, and the film intertwines several
stories about the boys who grow up there, usually to become drug dealers or
hoodlums. It’s a dirt-poor environment where parents are largely absent, and so
is a sense of much of anything except the pragmatic appeal of lawlessness and
anarchy. Meireilles is an award-winning director of commercials who leaps into
this, his debut film, with the confidence of an established master. He turns
the milieu into the world’s rattiest circus, marshalling the constant conflict
and misery and danger into a ceaseless swirl of incident.
The
film’s received some very high praise. Roger Ebert judged the picture the
second best of last year, behind Spielberg’s Minority Report. He wrote: “In its actual level of violence, City of God is less extreme than
Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, but the
two films have certain parallels. In both films, there are really two cities:
the city of the employed and secure, who are served by law and municipal
services, and the city of the castaways, whose alliances are born of opportunity
and desperation. Those who live beneath rarely have their stories told.”
“City of God,” concluded Ebert, “does not
exploit or condescend, does not pump up its stories for contrived effect, does
not contain silly and reassuring romantic sidebars, but simply looks, with a
passionately knowing eye, at what it knows.”
I like
the film, but I doubt I’m alone in finding that a bit much. Those who live
beneath rarely have their stories told? In fact, don’t movies contain a
disproportionate percentage of assassins, drug dealers and all-purpose
“sickos”? The new South American cinema (judging at least by the admittedly
thin sample of it that’s been shown commercially here) barely seems able to
tell any other stories.
And as
for simply looking at what it knows – well, a two-hour movie necessarily
involves a multitude of choices about it knows or doesn’t know. But in this
case it’s undeniable that the movie’s points are pretty much made after the
first hour. Up to that point we’re still gearing ourselves up to the film’s
imaginative velocity. Beyond that it keeps on going, becoming more and more
wrapped up in a single drugwar story that becomes increasingly mundane. The
movie never loses its feeling for real pain and incident, for the intimate
moment that drives home the cost of this machismo, but these moments
increasingly seem like appendages to its central momentum.
What it knows
The
comment about “simply looking” is off in another way too. City of God has a structure that travels back and forth through
time; a voice over that refers to plot strands to be revealed later, or doubles
back to clarify something that passed before. For all its immersion in the
moment, it’s a technique that conveys a restlessness with what’s before it, a
yearning to be somewhere else. In Alfonso Cuaron’s Y tu Mama tambien, the plot kept swerving off to explore the
destinies of various secondary characters. City
of God isn’t quite that volatile, but it foregoes the humanist patience of
a movie that just looks.
On the
whole, my own views are closer to David Edelstein in Slate. He writes: “The violence in City of God isn’t glorified, but it doesn’t get under your skin and
haunt you, either – which is odd when you consider the movie’s sociopolitical
trappings…and how many kids end up eating bullets on-screen. The only moment
that rips the pulp fabric is when Lil’ Ze hands a gun to a boy known as
Steak-and-Fries and commands him to choose which of two delinquent “runts” to
shoot – one of whom looks 6 years old and suddenly begins to sob like the small
child that he is. That infantile keening cuts through the camera’s wry
objectivity. It’s the only time we ever think ‘Don’t shoot,’ instead of
‘Duck!’”
He’s
right about the documentary-like tug of that scene (Katia Lund, who helped
Meireilles in marshalling non-professional actors and navigating unfriendly
terrain, is credited as co-director, which must indicate an unusually hefty
contribution). And it’s not quite true the film never attains that level
elsewhere – for instance, the Lil’ Ze character (he’s a child thug who grows up
to be a drug dealer) has some moments of murderous rage that I found chilling.
But the
sheer pace of the film, the relentlessness of its bad news, mitigates the
effect of any particular incident. The emotional impact flattens out rather
than accumulating. I sometimes worry, watching a film like this, that the sort
of comment I just made reflects my own sheltered unfamiliarity with violence;
that I wrongly assume it could only ever come, if at all, in small bursts, so that
any kind of sustained violence must be by definition melodramatic. But I don’t
worry about it for long, because such ignorance is far preferable to the
alternative.
The Recruit
At the
opposite end of the movie scale in just about every respect, Roger Donaldson’s The Recruit is a film of no social
relevance and run-of-the-mill style. It’s about a young CIA recruit (Colin
Farrell) led by his trainer (Al Pacino) into a complex plot where – as the
movie keeps reminding us to the point of tedium – nothing is what it seems.
Since we know from the start to mistrust everything the film seems to be
telling us, there’s little practical option while watching it other than to put
our brains on snooze.
The major
compensation – and it is a major one – is Pacino, in an incredibly imaginative
and charismatic performance. Virtually every line he speaks has a cadence or a
shading that you can’t imagine coming from any other actor – and it’s not just
eccentricity, for somehow it fuses into a compelling character. And for about
the tenth time in his career, he has a rambling closing monologue so out of
step with the pedestrian dialogue preceding it that he must have written it
himself. Pacino almost convinces you you’re watching something profound – an achievement
maybe only slightly less impressive than City
of God.
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