Such a comment is not really a judgement on the film one has just seen; instead it is an indictment of a local industry that seems incapable, most of the time, of making movies able to compete on a global stage. I am not qualified to go into all the reasons for this, or to speculate about solutions, but seeing the Brazilian movie City of God roused in me (to my own surprise) exactly that response — “Now that’s the kind of movie we should be making here.”
Actually, it’s the kind of movie more people all over the world should be making everywhere. It’s about real people, it deals with big social issues, and it is as compelling as an entirely invented thriller.
City of God, directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, is based on a bestselling novel by Paulo Lins, who grew up in the favela, or slum, of that rather blackly ironic name. The term “novel” is slightly misleading, because Lins spent eight years researching life and crime (in particular the drug trade) in the City of God, and the resultant work is as much detailed social documentary as it is an imagined narrative.
The filmmakers followed a similar course in their reworking of the novel. In finding and training their actors, young people (some 110 children, in fact) with no previous experience of acting, they set up a series of workshops in the run-up to the shooting of the film. That process allowed for strong character development based on the real-life experiences of people from places very much like the City of God, and then the movie was shot in the favelas themselves. (South Africans have had some spectacularly successful workshopped plays — Sizwe Bansi is Dead, The Island, Woza Albert!, Sophiatown. The movie Mapantsula went some way in this direction in the 1980s — couldn’t we be doing more of that? Jump the Gun used the workshop process for cinematic purposes, but it was not entirely successful, or so one is told. (And that’s the last reference I will make to South Africa in this review.)
The result, for City of God, the movie, is one of unparalleled richness of texture; it feels utterly real. The sense that one is watching a documentary and not a fiction film is often overpowering — except that the personal perspectives are so clear, the characters so resonant with the kind of inner life that documentary can describe but not enact.
The movie starts in the 1960s, early on in the life of this housing project, where grinding poverty makes a life of crime seem very appealing. It follows a group of characters through the 1970s and into the bloody and debilitating gang wars of the 1980s. All this actually took place, as Pins’s research revealed. In the movie, it is observed through the eyes of one Buscapé, nicknamed Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues).
He exists on the margins of this criminal world, and is in some ways a link between it and the rest of the world — the newspaper-reading world. His ambition to become a photographer is his escape.
But, as the filmmakers and other reviewers have noted, Rocket is not really the protagonist of the film. Neither, they say, is Li’l Zé (Leandro Firmino da Hora), Rocket’s childhood friend whom we see, in the course of the film, growing into the most ruthless and deadly drug lord in the favela. Instead, it is the City of God itself that is the central character.
That’s true enough, but we need Buscapé’s perspective and involvement to give us the story: we need to see it through his eyes. Consequently, we develop sympathy for him as a person, even if he isn’t an agent of events. As for Li’l Zé, he is like the Butcher character in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York — a compellingly evil figure who crystallises in fictional terms the movie’s concern with the corrupting, deadening effect of life in such a place. In the City of God, the psychotic man is king.
In fact, the comparison with Gangs of New York is instructive. Both that movie and City of God are films about gang wars in a specific historic time and place, though of course the Scorsese movie’s lavishly recreated setting stole the actors’ and the story’s thunder. Where the Scorsese movie was a detailed studio recreation of a particular era (the 1860s), and thus carried itself with a certain stiffness, City of God lifts its detail from the very streets, with fast, unruly camerawork that grows more unruly as the movie progresses, the drug wars turn into personal vendettas and the favela explodes.
If a moving camera makes you dizzy, stay away. The camera in City of God seems to zip around at bullet speed. The look of the whole, despite some coding for the different time periods, is so saturated with colour and texture that you can practically feel the heat and smell the streets. And the performances, if to call them that is not to downgrade them, leap off the screen. City of God is mesmerising, exhausting. One leaves the cinema stunned and drained, though also feeling the rare satisfaction of having seen a movie do more than most movies can.