After watching City of God, directed by Fernando Meirelles, one leaves convinced that the scariest thing in the world is a child with a gun. “A kid? I smoke, I snort, I’ve killed and robbed a man,” says one anonymous character. Groups of single-digit-aged boys run rampant and buck the hell out of each other. With little remorse and fueled by pot-induced bravado, there’s no telling what these brats can do.
Based on Paulo Lins’ autobiographical novel, City of God takes place in the ghettos of Rio de Janeiro. The story is centered specifically around one slum, Ciudad de Dios, created in the 1960s to house displaced families sacrificed at the altar of beach resorts. Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), Benny (Phellipe Haagensen) and Li’l Ze (Leandro Firmino) are kids who move to Ciudad de Dios when it is still fairly new and small. The ghetto doesn’t stop, though, and as the buildings expand from squat houses to claustrophobic apartment buildings, these three go their own ways as they orbit and control the area’s lucrative drug trade.
Li’l Ze soon becomes the gang overlord of Ciudad de Dios. Brutal, violent and evil, the only thing holding him back from complete insanity is Benny, a more diplomatic thug who wants nothing more than to live the good life. Rocket, our narrator, begins an artistic life as he learns photography while trying not to get shot.
The acting, especially in these three leads, is superb. More impressive is the fact that almost every single performer was a non-professional, plucked from the streets in which the film takes place. Hundreds of amateur children were auditioned and encouraged to improvise lines and interactions. As a result, they burst through the screen with authenticity. These boys emit a sense of youthful energy tempered by a tragic fatalism. Characters die at the drop of a hat, especially if they “are fucking useless,” a refrain repeated again and again—one’s lifeline shortens alongside diminishing practicality.
The film has a remarkable virtuosity, shooting us through characters, decades and stories with the speed of a bullet set to sexy samba rhythms. Stylistically, it owes a debt to everything from Goodfellas to Boogie Nights, Snatch to Pulp Fiction. The narrative jumps ahead in time and then back, giving us a taste of things to come before rapidly moving in another direction. A scene is shown and then later is presented from a different angle, a different point of view. Meirelles raids the cinematic cookie jar and comes out with his hands too full; whether it’s a split screen or a Matrix-style freeze and shift of position, his kitchen sink of formal gimmicks comes fairly close to imploding. The effects work, however, because they move the story forward.
One particularly impressive scene, titled “The Story of the Apartment,” fixes the camera at one end of a drug den as years pass by before our eyes, characters fade in and out, days break and nights fall. It’s hard to remember the last time a movie made its audience say “that was amazing” out loud, but this film accomplishes just that. The film’s stylistic conceits are balanced by an emotional awareness that makes City of God more than just a shoot ‘em up flick.
About halfway through the movie, Li’l Ze catches up with two of The Runts, a group of pre-pubescents who are robbing, stealing and disrespecting his authority. He forces them to choose whether they want to get shot in the hand or the foot. Before the bullet hits, the six-year old breaks down into tears as real as that of anyone’s kid brother. It’s almost impossible for one to not cry during this scene as the absurdity of this world comes crashing home. After this, the audience is ready to believe that anything can happen to these characters.
City of God is violent and jarring, but also humane and engrossing. There is very little in the movie that exists without reason. One gets used to the violence, somewhat, because the characters live and die in the same way—jaded and resigned to the meaningless way in which their lives play out. Stylistic violence dovetails with likable and complex characters to produce a movie that needs to be seen. City of God strides cockily into the cinematic morass of early 2003 and knocks everything else down without hesitation or concern.
