alonewiththemoon | City of God

I watched Cidade de Deus, or City of God, last night. I rented it on Nick Cave's recommendation ("recommendation" in the sense of in some interview somewhere he said it was good, not in the sense of I was hanging out with my good buddy Nick and he personally told me I'd like it), and also because I am a sucker for non-linear story-telling.

City of God is a profoundly violent movie. The violence might be over- or melo-dramaticized, but almost never does it feel stylized in a Hollywood Tarantino sense. In many ways this was a horror movie, but the horror is real and it is lived every day by some 2 million people in Brazil. Some beauty and tenderness exists in people's lives, as seen in various scenes on the beach and in the dancehall, but it takes a strong person to walk away from the violence, and it takes a lucky person not to get shot in the back as they walk away. The scene with the chicken at the very beginning of the film is a very clear foreshadowing of things to come. The movie, based on the life of a real person, follows the life of Rocket as he grows from a young boy to a young man finding his own way in the favela (slum) in which he was born and struggling to find his way out of it through his gift for photography. As the story progresses, time loops back to include each character's story as the character is introduced to show why it is inevitable that some events had to happen as they did and to show the interconnectedness of everyone in the favela, that each person's actions create the entire community. And when one of those persons is a charismatic sociopath and the community is already a tinderbox of rivalries and grudges and even the children are armed and dangerous, well, that's horror.

Any good feeling you might have from Rocket's personal story can be pretty quickly disintegrated by watching the 50-minute documentary in the extras section about life in the favelas. However the filmmakers did it, they managed to get interviews with policemen (from the street patrol to the chief of police of Rio), drug dealers, ordinary people just trying to live their lives, prisoners, former and would-be revolutionaries, etc. I think it is only the relentlessly capitalist economics of drug dealing that have kept the favelas from being swept up into communist or socialist revolution. As the chief of police of Rio de Janeiro observed, given all the guns they have and the sheer numbers of people in the favelas, if the drug dealers ever banded together they could stage a military takeover of the city very easily. The police use obsolete weapons while the dealers use the newest imports from Switzerland, Israel, Russia and the US, and so many of the police are on the take that they might not fight anyway. But the dealers fight each other for territory and supply, and a traumatized population tries to live in peace as best they can. Two observations stuck out to me. One was by an ordinary policeman, who noted that the only time any government representatives go into the favela, they are police on raids--never public works, never any kind of food or relief, no medical personnel, just police. He could not blame the people for taking the side of the drug dealers who might sometimes provide housing materials, food, medicine, etc to the people in their territories. That lack of blame was not the same thing as empathy, though; he had no regrets about any of the people he personally had killed. Somewhat similar remarks were made about the police by dealers, that the police were just doing their job, but they were all clearly dehumanized by the conflict and the escalating savagry (deaths by burning tires, the shooting of children). The other observation was made by the chief of police, who put the blame for everything squarely on Brazil's middle and upper class, who he said were not truly interested in either a non-corrupt police force or in ending the drug trade. A clean police force would prosecute the middle and upper class for their own crimes, from parking violations to murder, and of course, the people with the money are the very people who are fueling the drug trade, and they don't want to lose their supplies. The chief matter of factly felt that the only solution for the favelas was either a complete 180 in Brazilian culture, or an utter bloodbath.

It's the rainy season where I'm living
Death comes leaping out of every doorway
Wasting you for money, for your clothes
And for your nothing
Entire towns being washed away
Favelas exploding on inflammable spillways
Lynch-mobs, death squads, babies being born without brains
The mad heat and the relentless rains
And if you stick your arm into that hole
It comes out sheared off to the bone

Do I recommend this movie? Yes. I am glad, if that is the right word, that I saw it. One should know that these things happen in the world. And from a art film standpoint, it is beautifully filmed, and the timing is explosive in a way that is inevitable yet shocking at the same time. But it's going to take me a long while to process what I've seen, and to incorporate this into my view of the world.