City of God (2002)

Now this is filmmaking for the 21st century. "City of God" is crammed full of energy, vitality, color, and a restless but devoted enthusiasm to its story and characters. This is the debut feature film for Fernando Meirelles, a successful director of commercials in Brazil. Commercial and music video directors have proven themselves masters of visual technique, but they are trained to capture and maintain the interest of the audience for short bursts at a time. Meirelles, along with co-director Katia Lund, manage to use virtuoso camerawork and editing to bring the film alive, rather than allow technique to overwhelm the story. I can't imagine anyone straying focus from this film for one second.

The City of God is an impoverished ghetto on the outskirts of Rio De Janiero. The film chronicles nearly two decades of development, introducing the City of God as a dumping ground by the government for poor migrants. At the end of the film, the area has become an autonomous war zone, with an intricate system of laws and rules dictated by the drug gangs that rule the town's inhabitants. We follow the story through the guidance of Rocket, who as a child watches his brother form a pioneer gang called the Tender Trio, who make a clumsy living by robbing gasoline trucks when not playing soccer in the dirt streets. Tagging along with the teenagers is Li'l Dice, who is small and disrespected, but a born bloodthirsty hood. It is Li'l Dice who comes up with the idea to rob the patrons of a local motel. When he is cast aside by the Tender Trio, the little boy portends his own future by upsetting the older boys' plans in a manic fashion.

Li'l Dice grows up to become Li'l Ze, the fearsome gang leader who wipes out his rivals in the City of God with swift ease. Along with his partner, the affable Benny, the hood that everyone likes, he instills a structure of law and rule that had been previously absent in the neglected neighborhood. Rocket, through a combination of his own passiveness and ineptitude, never quite gives himself in to the life of crime, although it is clear that in the City of God, there is often very little choice to turn to drug dealing and violence. Rocket is immersed in the world, losing his girl to Benny and his brother to Li'l Ze, but handcuffed to do anything about it; these are the guys that decide who lives and dies in his home.

The film is stacked with characters with colorful names that go along with their personalities. There are many humorous situations, as when Benny chases down another boy in a tense scene, only to ask him to go clothes-shopping for him. Meirelles never forgets the City of God, however, and adds horrifying moments that remind the audience of the frightening jungle of crime in which these characters live. One particularly disturbing scene has Li'l Ze initiating a new member by forcing him to choose between two cowering young children to kill. This, after asking a tearful boy, no older than 8 years old, whether he wants to be shot in the hand or in the foot.

Films that have such sobering subject matter can often impress with a minimum of cinematic flair; since the content is so dramatic in and of itself (see my review of "The Magdalene Sisters"). By using almost every trick in the book (split screens, non-linear narrative, jump cuts, flashbacks, flashforwards, stop-action), Meirelles' film goes beyond the realm of good presentation to fantastic movie-making. The film is visually great to look at, often very funny, and gives us characters in whom we involved ourselves. The terrible cycle of violence and crime is always in the foreground, however, and at the end of the film, when we see actual documentary footage of some of the characters we previously thought were fictionalized, we remember that people are still fighting wars in places like the City of God to this very day, and despite all the color and the characters and the visuals, the drama still comes from knowing that very fact.