Shaun de Waal Movie of the week
Many years ago, I had a film lecturer who relied heavily on the binary oppositions that are or were the primary tools of structuralist analysis – you know, self/other, white/black, appearance/reality, personal/political, and so on.
Whenever he was trying to explore what a particular movie might be about, he’d start with a list of such oppositions. The first would usually be “youth vs age”, which led some of his students to speculate that this reflected his interest in younger women.
I underwent this flashback while watching Walter Salles’s lovely film Central Station, and it is not entirely inappropriate.
The movie is most assuredly about youth vs age – and also the personal vs the political, though the latter is cleverly disguised by the former.
This is no manifesto, but Salles has been quite clear about the social and political concerns underlying his conception of the movie.
In Portuguese, its title is Central do Brasil, which emphasises the sense that it is as much about Brazil itself as it is about a middle-aged letter-writer, Dora (Fernanda Montenegro), who ends up trekking across Brazil, from centre to margin, with a nine-year-old boy, Josu (Vinicius de Oliveira), who is searching for his father.
In the wake of urban overcrowding (and thus soaring unemployment, crime, violence) and the failure of economic restructuring, Brazil is in a state of self-reappraisal.
“Today,” writes Salles, “an important quest is surfacing: the desire to find another country, one that may be simpler and less glorious than previously announced, but [one that] aims to be more compassionate and human.”
Central Station, he says, is a film about a “country searching for its own roots”.
Once you know that – and even if you don’t – you can simply concentrate on the story of Dora and Josu, this unlikely couple thrown together by tragic circumstance, and their quest.
Or quests: we know what Josu is looking for, but Dora’s journey is more complex – it is a journey within herself as much as along the dusty roads of Brazil. She may not even always know what she is searching for in this hitherto unmapped and untravelled interior.
As Dora, Montenegro is superb. One can see why she has been nominated and awarded (as was the film itself, and the director) for this performance.
Her friable face and dowdy bearing seem to sum up a history of personal struggle, probably just to survive, as does her brusque letter-scribbling for displaced illiterates in the midst of the station’s chaos.
Montenegro conveys Dora’s half-aware ambivalence, her desire to rid herself of the boy (and make some money while she’s about it), even as her feeling for him grows, with moving exactitude; and the way she shows Dora dealing with the vicissitudes of the trek – emotional as well as practical – is wonderful to watch. Which goes for Central Station as a whole.