City of God
Why we chose this film
City of God is a timeless piece of art.
While its violence profoundly disturbs, its beauty deeply touches our souls.
Most of us are compelled to condemn the characters that have taken a wrong turn.
It is easy to judge while sitting in the comfort of our homes, but do we ever ask ourselves what our lives would be like if we were born into a different scenario?
Our society, which likes to promote meritocracy, will immediately point out the rare success stories of people making it despite the circumstances they grew up in.
Asking the individual to carry the weight of their own fate, relieves us (and society as a whole) of any kind of responsibility.
In the light of regular events involving youth crime, it might help to remind ourselves from time to time that the environment we are born into provides us with choices and opportunities that others will never have.
Film Summary
It is a young man's movie: It adores action, swagger, local colour, eccentricity, machismo, stupidity. Meirelles just can't stop telling stories, and he can't stop revelling in the goopy mud of bad behaviour as it plays out in the swamp of heart and city. He's like a mad anthropologist who's found an undiscovered tribe in the mountains of New Guinea and can't leave it alone. You feel his love of his subject, of his own infernally gifted filmmaking, of the freedom he suddenly feels in features (he'd directed commercials in San Paolo); you feel the quickening of energy and endless possibility in him. So the result is a contradiction: a joyous film about murder.
"City of God" never gives itself over to pure nihilism. In fact, under the bravado, it's tragic, and that shell of ironic bravado keeps it watchable, though even that may be a close call for many genteel moviegoers: It's not for the weak of heart or stomach. Its evocations of casual, almost numbingly regular violence just go on and on and on. Plus, a chicken gets killed!
What is interesting is gangsters. The first law of gangster thermodynamics states that Gangsters Are Always Interesting, and the movie bears this out. These aren't gangsters like Scorsese's stovepipe-hat-wearing hooligans with their spiked curling clubs, and they're not Hollywood tommygunners named Scarface or Rico or Don Corleone. They're not a later generation's gangsta-rapsters with Berettas held sideways. No, they're, well, they're kids -- scruffy, dirty, scampering around on the dusty play-fields and squalid alleys, their body language expressing the weightlessness of their thin bones and scrawny chests, their clothes just any old rags, their feet bare or sporting flip-flops. You see them everywhere, but they don't carry guns everywhere. They carry guns only in the City of God.
What is astonishing about the film, beyond its pure movie fluency, is the presence of the young actors. These are not professionals. Rather, Mierelles found them on the streets, and gradually inculcated them to film culture through a series of workshops. Perhaps in no other way could he have captured the exuberance, the unself-consciousness, the pure naturalism that he does. Whatever, the movie feels like no other I've ever seen.
If one of the moral responsibilities of the movies is to put you in places where you'd never go and live lives you'd never live, then "City of God" is great moviemaking. This one admits no other moral responsibilities. It merely gazes pitilessly at the real, and maybe that reality is too hard to take. It offers scant optimism to policymakers of any stripe. It advises liberals that social programs are pointless when applied to the violent vitality of the streets, and it advises conservatives that stern bromides about responsibility are as ineffective against the will to violence as a fistful of feathers. It says man is dark and doomed and stupid. But it also says he’s alive and kicking and magnificent.
Stephen Hunter / Washington Post
