12 • THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
FILM
THURSDAY, APRIL10, 2003
'City of God'a violent, wild time
REVIEW
It's become my personal mission in life to get people to see City of God. This is the kind of wild-ass masterpiece nobody makes anymore, a movie that recalls the golden age of 1970s Hollywood, a thrill-seeking entertainment on the level of Goodfellas and Boogie Nights. Forget that it's in Portuguese with English subtitles. Exhilaration is a universal language.
Stephen Shupe
sshupe@kansan.com
Bursting with more energy than the last 10 films I've reviewed combined, City of God is a violent plunge into a forgotten underworld — the Brazilian slums that served as ground zero for drug trafficking through Rio de Janeiro in the '60s and '70s. The film's epic scope begins with the end of one generation of dealers and follows the natural progression of the next, rendering the endless cycle of the drug world with astonishing clarity.
Based on a true story, the film's hero is Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), a bright youth blessed with more gifts than his world knows what to do with. The '60s, the shorter of the film's two eras, depicts the downfall of Rocket's older brother, Shaggy (Johnathan Haagensen) and his hoodlum friends. With most of them wiped out after
Bursting with more energy than the last 10 films I've reviewed combined, 'City of God' is a violent plunge into a forgotten underworld.
a hold-up that ends in a bloodbath, the action jumps to Rocket as a teenager as he begins to show a budding interest in photography and losing his virginity.
Like Pulp Fiction, the film is broken into sub-sections with titles of their own. In a brutal early episode, we see the psychopathic Li'l Ze (Firmino da Hora) morph from a little
kid cackling as he massacres a motel room to a paranoid adult who's the boss of the city. In another, the violent history of an apartment unravels in a dizzying series of shots taken from a single camera set-up.
As a purely sensory experience, City of God is nothing short of breathtaking. The director, Fernando Meirelles, sends us hurtling over the crumbling walls of the city, as if the camera were constantly racing to catch up with the characters. The middle part of the movie, in which Rocket befriends a good-hearted gangster named Benny (Phillippe Haagensen), is a surreal rock-and-roll fantasia in the tradition of Apocalypse Now. Every scene brings with it a new discovery, a new excitement.
With just as much flair, Meirelles jampacks his film with tremendously resonant thematic undertones. The catching nature of violence is in City of God an urbanized version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, where savage boys quench the bloodthirsty beast within. Even Rocket has to fall back on a life of crime, in a place where it really is the only thing that pays.
The adrenaline factor might seem inappropriate at times for a movie this bleak. In a
CITY OF GOD ... A
Starring: Alexandre Rodriques, Phillipe Haagensen and Fermino da Hora.
Rated R for strong, brutal violence,
sexuality, drug content and language.
Playing at Liberty Hall Theater, 642 Massachusetts St.
heartbreaking sequence, a child is forced to choose between two friends, one of whom he'll have to murder in cold blood. But the film is often brightened by Rocket's ironyting voice-over. And there's always someone to root for, be it Rocket as he leaves the city for a career in photojournalism or Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge) - once a straight-and-narrow role model - as he joins up with a rival gang to take down Li'l Ze.
City of God continues a wonderful streak of terrific Latin-American films, after Amores Perros and YTu Mama Tambien, suggesting today's serious artistic breakthroughs are to be found east of Hollywood and south of the border.
Shupe is an Augusta graduate student in journalism