Terrible truth and unlikely hope

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2003 (8479 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CITY of God (in Portuguese, with subtitles) depicts dozens of casual killings — at one point, a gangster hauls off and shoots one of his flunkies in the head because he’s sick of the guy’s bad jokes — but the film itself is anything but casual in its approach to violence.

Young American filmmakers raised in middle-class suburbs may get all hepped up on stylized sadism and choreographed carnage, but for Brazilian director Fernande Meirelles novelist Paolo Lins, screenwriter Braulio Mantovani and their crew of mostly non-professional actors — many of them street kids from Rio slums on temporary breaks from being lookouts and mules for coke dealers — violence is not a video game.

Though their work is visceral and disturbingly violent — many of the victims and victors in these brutal street battles are under the age of 12 — it is also brim-full of compassion and humanity and sheer love of life.

The film tells the grim, fact-based saga of the ironically named City of God, a Rio de Janeiro housing project that was erected in the 1960s and then pretty much ignored by the government and the police, degenerating by the 1980s into a criminal war zone ruled by teenaged drug lords.

The story sprawls over two decades and scores of characters, veering off to follow first one vivid, doomed kid and then another.

Holding this crowded, complex world together is the central character of Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), a young man who’s too decent, and too timid to become a gangster, but whose life in the City of God involves a constant, careful navigation around the outlaw way of life — and death.

Through Rocket’s observing eyes, we witness horrible things — an adolescent sociopath named Lil Ze (Leandro Firmino da Hora) who murders without a second thought, a gang of pint-sized kids called The Runts who’d kill you as soon as look at you.

But somehow — somehow! — City of God is never a bringdown. First of all, there is an infectious energy in Meirelles’ fluid, vivid visual language, from the scary-funny opening scene, in which a bunch of heavily armed, frighteningly impulsive thugs chase a confused chicken down a street, to the final sequence that brings everything full circle.

In between, there are some gorgeous scenes about the joys of being young, cool, beautiful and having nothing much to do except hang out and listen to samba or funk music — joys that are even keener when so many of these tragic characters have so little beyond these moments.

In the end, Rocket saves himself by becoming an artist — a press photographer — and the movie as a whole reflects his faith in the power of seeing and understanding and expressing, especially in the face of dehumanizing poverty and violence.

City of God’s terrible truthfulness makes it an important film; its unlikely hopefulness makes it a watchable one.