Cast: Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino da Hora

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Screenplay: Fernando Meirelles

Running time: 2 hrs 10 mins

Genre: Foreign/Crime/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Amongst the plethora of gangster pictures, The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, The Little Rascals (delete where necessary), Fernando Meirelles’s second directorial feature City of God sticks out like a sore thumb. Mostly because it is subtitled and utterly foreign. Nevertheless, it has a quality that tantamount the class and scope of those great gangster masterpieces. Its genius lies behind its recognition of basic gangster elements (immoral bunch of blokes, awful crimes, shoot-outs) whilst possessing a certain liberal control in its narrative, throwing any hint of cliché out of the window. Employing a flashback structure, the film opens with a zip-flash editing – sharpening of knives, running feet and a fugitive chicken – the camera in Paul Greengrass mode, jumpy, intensely kinetic, coursing through the grimy favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the titular Ciudade de Deus, introducing us to the slum’s hooligans and the main hero, then propelling the storyline back decades earlier in the sixties. Notice its indelible influence on Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, the editing is spectacular. The control of narrative here is impressive, drawing a densely woven crisscrossing of tales, Rocket, as the protagonist, the photographer-wannabe, serving as the lynchpin to where other different stories spin on. The childhood portrait of astonishing delinquency is masterfully evoked. Nasty robberies around the underclass household estate rub elbows with the extreme poverty gripping the place, with children witnessing these events and at the same time getting their moralities blurred. Thanks then that it doesn’t preach about morals. It is dizzyingly violent but never gratuitous, artistically charged yet never gimmicky and complex without being too complicated. There are plentiful of stories here and tons of characters, but it still stays in the right side of comprehensible.


City of God barely advocates what’s right or not; it simply illustrates what life in the crime-ridden favelas is like and the inexorable attitudes of its youth, with guns and cocaine as their bread-and-butter. Yet it’s never dumb. There are extremely powerful scenes of certain knowing and eloquence of character study – Lil’ Dices sudden gun-toting spree in a motel out of bullying, the interplay between cool thug Bené and gang boss Lil’ Z, the revenge psychosis of Knockout Ned, and most shattering of all to watch is when a gang newbie is forced to shoot one of the two little boys from the block. These miniscule performances from many different unknown actors are staggeringly life-like.


VERDICT:

Brutal and breathless, City of God dismounts any scintilla of romanticism present in gangster films like The Godfather. This is a sprawling crime epic; uncompromising, vigorous and will leave its audience slack-jawed. It is that brilliant.



RATING: A+