BUS 174 -------
In the year 2000 on Rio de Janeiro's Jardim Botanico, Sandro, a homeless man with a gun, hijacked a bus and its passengers. Local police failed to secure the area, and soon the bus was surrounded by police, a swarm of media, crowds of onlookers and passers-by. Using the live media coverage of that day and comments from survivors, Sandro's friends and family, social workers, police and S.W.A.T. team members, director Jose Padilha examines the culmination of events that led to the tragedy known as "Bus 174."
The persecution of the children of Rio de Janeiro's slums has been exposed in feature films from Hector Babenco's 1981 film "Pixote" through last year's "City of God." Padilha's classically structured documentary (live footage intercut with talking heads) is an indictment of an entire social structure, which breeds brutality on its own streets. It also raises an disturbing conundrum in that one of the very causes of the incident, an inflamed media which broadcast live coverage, has provided the director with the reality footage which makes this work so compelling.
"Bus 174" begins with aerial shots of the crowded city while voices of the homeless tell wildly divergent stories of how they ended up on the streets. Later on in the film, when the siege on Bus 174 is at its peak, Padilha will repeat the aerial shot, this time showing his city as one engulfed by mountaintop broadcast towers.
The documentary is structured as a build of the makeup of Sandro, an orphaned, drug-addicted street kid and the failure of the city's protective agencies to save his hostages even though they had myriad opportunities to do so. The media is the third story here, a barrier which exploited Sandro for reality 'entertainment' and protected him from the violence that ultimately created victims.
Padilha places police and survivor interviews in black-backdropped studio settings, while Sandro's family and friends, including a social worker known as Aunt Yvonne, are interviewed within their own landscapes, the city's streets and jails. Captain Batista, a S.W.A.T. negotiator, expresses a disdain for the local police, believed to be poorly trained with only an objective to shoot down criminals. Captain Pimentel, a S.W.A.T. instructor, defines an 'interrupted robbery' as a situation where the perpetrator takes hostages and says there is strong argument that it is better to let people escape under such circumstances. The police's failure to secure the area is astounding. We see a man blithely ride a bike by the bus, unaware that a man is threatening people with a gun two to three feet away. Survivor Luana Belmont admits that she didn't take anything seriously at first, calling her boss from the back of the bus to say she'd be late for work - a sad statement on Rio's general safety levels.
Sandro's background is introduced generically, with video of street kids stopping traffic on a major thoroughfare to put on juggling shows for money. As a social worker describes their need to have a social existence, Padilha's choice of image displays how needy people can become viewed as a nuisance to more comfortable segments of society. Early on, we're told that Sandro saw his mother slaughtered in front of him when he was only six years old, something which haunted him for life. The infamous Candalaria massacre is retold, an unsolved crime where a gunman mowed down homeless kids who had been sleeping at the downtown church. Amazingly, Sandro is located as a young child in video shot there the day before. More shocking, though, is a female Candalaria survivor recounting how people would come there at night and crush the heads of sleeping kids with curbstones. Reports from the Padre Severion juvenile jail flash across the screen as we're told that Sandro's behavior was markedly better after visits from his Aunt Julieta and his sister, then we hear another former inmate describe deplorable conditions including beatings. In general, Sandro sounds like a petty criminal who escaped reality with coke (Belmont describes him as having seemed high) and sniffing glue, yet Padilha includes another street criminal, eerily masked on head and arms and hands, who explains that he and his friends have no mercy for those better off, then recounts a horrific crime. A woman described as Sandro's adoptive mom shows the camera her very poor home and says with wonder 'I can't believe I have a bathroom. I can't believe I have a stove to fry potatoes.' Padilha shows the distinct difference in the behavior of those who have a home, no matter how humble.
The media is the loose cannon in this whole mess. Clearly Sandro, even high, was familiar enough with the power of television to know how to play it. He instructed his victims to write with lipstick on the bus windows - 'He is going to kill us all' being an example. He set a 6 p.m. deadline on his demands to rachet up the drama and survivors tell us that 'He told us to make things more dramatic. There was dialogue going on in the bus.' Sandro even stages a shooting, his distaste for actually harming someone adding to the tragedy that ensues. Sandro's use of the media did protect him, as police were reluctant to enact a bloody shooting on camera. Yet clearly, though Padilha uses these media images to bring injustices to light, isn't it safe to assume this whole affair would have been nipped in the bud in their absence?
A
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