City of God

At the beginning of City of

God, the critically-acclaimed new movie about the slums of Rio de Janeiro,

a young thug in the eponymous neighborhood is showing off his footwork to some

younger kids. As he kicks a football from foot to foot, the kids count along

with him – "11! 12! 13!" – until his friends run up with

the news that a gas truck is approaching. He boots the ball up into the air,

pulls out a gun, and shoots a hole through it as he turns to run off for the

hold-up. The director, Fernando Meirelles, freezes the football in mid-air,

a hole bulging out at its top where the bullet escaped along with the compressed

air inside.

The scene is shocking: the casual violence and gunplay, the way in which an

older hood nonchalantly scuppers a football game by deflating the ball, the

conflation of playful sport and serious crime. But guns are everywhere in this

film, from the very beginning, when a hood pulls a pistol on a runaway chicken,

to the blood-soaked ending. I can’t imagine that five minutes pass at any point

when we don’t see someone brandishing a gun, be it a hardened sociopath or a

six-year-old delinquent.

The anti-hero of the movie, Li’l Zé (Leandro Firmino da Hora) starts

on his life of crime by committing one of the bloodiest atrocities in Rio de

Janeiro history – not an easy task. What’s more, he does it just for fun,

laughing hysterically at the corpses in front of him, men and women who had

already given all their money to his accomplices. Oh, and did I mention he’s

barely into his teens?

But it’s not just Li’l Zé who acts like a character out of some dystopian

comic-book. At times, it seems that a scene can’t end without another character

being killed off, be it by hoods, by the police, by a jealous husband, or just

by sheer bad luck. At the beginning, the violence is shocking, even when all

that’s being shot is a football. By the end, we’re numbed senseless, and the

climactic all-out running street battle barely registers. Many more people die

than in the equivalent scene in, say, Michael Mann’s Heat, but the

sequence is so predictable that by that point we’ve given up caring. Boy becomes

hood, dies: it’s a story we see over and over again, with the only differences

in the details. Not one of the hoods escapes, not one is redeemed. Insofar as

there’s a narrative structure to the film, it exists only to provide enough

space to make sure that everybody dies at some point.

Everybody? Not quite. One boy does make it out of the slums and into a proper

job, due to a string of incredible coincidences. He’s Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues),

our narrator, who miraculously avoids ever committing a crime, and whose love

of taking photos on the beach turns out to be his ticket out of the ghetto.

He’s the boy who can walk into the City of God with a camera and walk out in

one piece, unlike any of the middle-class journalists on the local daily. Armed

with his street savvy, he knows where the dirty deals are going to go down,

and parlays that knowledge into a magazine cover.

At the end of the film, a new generation of hoods is growing up,

plotting its own senseless killings, filling the vacuum left by the dead. We,

the audience, meanwhile, are not exactly filled with a missionary zeal to go

down to Brazil and save these poor children from their dog-eat-dog upbringings.

(They don’t even have hot running water, you know!) The omnipresent violence

in the film has turned it from an exposé into an exploitation flick,

or at best just another sub-Guy Ritchie gangster movie. (It doesn’t help that

the lead villiain looks astonishingly like one of the big drug dealers in Lock,

Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.) None of the characters are really developed,

with the possible exception of the lead, and the female parts are woefully few and

underwritten.

Part of the problem comes from the fact that the script was adapted from a

sprawling 500-page memoir, covering 30 years in the history of Rio de Janeiro.

In order to turn it into a film, it would seem that everything was cut but the

most violent parts, giving an impression of a slum so anarchic that it’s a wonder

anybody survives it at all. The hoods in this film get into arguments with each

other occasionally, and after a while one’s generally surprised if no one is

dead at the end of a disagreement over the relative merits of marijuana and cocaine. The idea that there is a community, a life beyond crime,

in the favela is completely lost.

That said, City of God has been a very successful and important film

in Brazil. It’s brought the plight of the slum-dwellers to the population as

a whole, and by telling their stories rather than simply demonising them as

evil criminals, it has changed the nature of the debate about how to deal with

the country’s rampant poverty. For that, it should be praised. The acting, too,

is first-rate, mostly from non-professionals plucked from the slums. Would that

many Hollywood actors had the naturalism of these kids!

But as an art-house film in cinemas in north America and Europe, City of

God is a failure. The director bangs too frequently on the same note; the

script has little shape, substance or subtlety; and the dispassionate, documentary-style

nature of the filmmaking leaves us unmoved. More worthy than it is good, City

of God is the type of film whose subject matter makes it hard to criticise.

Everything from the subject matter to the use of untrained actors makes us want

to like this film. But as entertainment, it’s not up to Hollywood standards,

as documentary, it’s too cavalier with reality, and and art, it simply lacks

depth and beauty.