CITY OF GOD (Cidade de Deus) ----------------------------
A knife is honed against a rock. Music fills the air. A barbecue grill sizzles. A panicky chicken watches his brethren being plucked and makes a mad dash for it. The beginning of the film is the beginning of the end of a three decade history behind the breeding of drug lords who rule the Rio neighborhood slum known as "City of God."
Tyro director Fernando Meirelles's dazzling, multi-storied epic gives a wide-angle view of the same violent and hopeless life captured over two decades earlier in Hector Babenco's Sao Paolo microcosm, "Pixote." Braulio Mantovani took on the daunting task of adapting Paul Lins' 700 page, 352 character novel and shaped it by focusing on the character of Rocket, an observant aspiring photographer not unlike the novel's author who acts as the film's narrator.
The story is broken into three decades and further broken down, via title, into various story threads which loop forwards and backwards and cross over each other. In the 1960s, Cidade de Deus was a government housing area for the homeless on the non-tourist side of Rio de Janeiro's Sugar Loaf Mountain consisting of two room bungalows with no electricity and roads of red clay. A young Rocket (Luis Otavio) tells the tale of the Tender Trio, consisting of his older brother Goose (Renato de Souza), Clipper (Jefechander Suplino) and leader Shaggy (Jonathan Haagensen). Not content with robbing gas trucks, Shaggy listens to Lil Dice (Douglas Silva), a kid with a plan for robbing a motel and an underlying, more heinous agenda.
The 1970s find City of God growing upwards, its bungalows living in the shadows of multi-story buildings, its streets narrower. Lil Dice has grown up and renamed himself Lil Ze (Leandro Firmino da Hora), an ugly ruthless drug dealer who kills off his competition but protects local shopkeepers from robbery. (Lil Ze's ascendence is brilliantly and economically told in a montage of scenes (edited by Daniel Rezende) which dissolve into and overlap one another titled 'The Apartment.') His best friend Benny (Phellipe Haagensen) is his unequal partner who becomes known as the 'coolest hood' in Ciudad de Deus. Benny, a 'make love, not war' type, decides to leave with girlfriend Angelica (Alice Braga) and his farewell blast
breeds the events that will being Lil Ze's downfall in the early 1980s.
The neighborhood is now crowded squalor connected by dense alleyways. Lil Ze has made a powerful enemy in Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge), a handsome, good man provoked over his girlfriend's refusal to dance with Lil Ze. Rape, murder and rampant destruction must be revenged, so Ned partners with Lil Ze's competition, Carrot (Matheus Nachtergaele), and an all out war ensues. Rio's corrupt police keep the wrong man in power, but the runts, a ragtag group of heavily armed eight to ten year olds, have a score to settle
with Lil Ze.
Meirelles uses cinematic tricks and styles from films as disparate as "The Matrix" to Spike Lee's "Clockers" to tell his tale. He shifts from one decade
to the next in one 360 degree camera move. He stops for a character's mini-story "Run Lola Run" style, before returning to his main action. Cinematographer Cesar Charlone's camera flies on a bullet's path or seemingly on the tail feathers of a terror-stricken chicken. Death comes between the strobe lights of a disco like the murder in "Looking for Mr. Goodbar." Gangs move herky-jerky through the streets in sped up fashion like a deadly serious version of "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."
Codirector Katia Lund was Meirelles's link to the real favelas of Rio and together they workshopped neighborhood kids for eight months to distill their cast. The results are incredible, the performances too myriad too mention. Art director Tule Peake attains three decades of the evolution of a district beginning with the red palette of dawn and sepia toned nostalgia and ending in the steely gray light of war-torn streets. Original music by Antonio Pinto and Ed Cortes also charts the eras. Mantovani's screenplay gets at the essence of how a 'life is cheap' mentality is created by a society which sweeps its unfortunates under the rug to foment their own pecking order. However, with so many stories being told, "City of God" doesn't deliver on the emotional level of the superior "Pixote." Still, "City of God" is an astounding debut for Meirelles, a director who clearly understands the art of collaborative filmmaking. And that chicken? You'll have to see the movie to learn his fate.
A-
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