City of God
Cidade de Deus
Fernando Meirelles (2002)
Our DVD collection includes a group of films I’ve not yet written about, most of them favourites last seen twenty or more years ago. The remainder – received as well-meant (unrequested) birthday or Christmas presents – I’ve still not got round to seeing for the first time. I’m not organised enough to work through them at home so I tend to book whenever one is showing at BFI. The Brazilian crime picture City of God is one of these unwatched films – although it’s unusual in that I did once start watching but quickly decided to postpone the effort. Now Fernando Meirelles’s best-known film has been re-released in cinemas, BFI among them.
In a Rio de Janeiro shantytown that really is called ‘City of God’ (a fine example of Paradise Street syndrome), live chickens, soon to be dead ones, are tied up on a street stall. One bird gets free and makes a run for it, pursued by a local gang; then the gang is pursued by police. This is the breakneck opening of Meirelles’s film and it’s visually startling. When a male voiceover tells us that ‘in the City of God, if you run you’re dead – if you stay, you’re dead too’, he may be referring to himself rather than to the bird but he makes it clear, if it wasn’t already, that that chicken is symbolic. City of God’s tagline(s) became ‘If you run, the beast catches you; if you stay, the beast eats you’. Walter Salles, one of the film’s several co-producers, has confirmed that ‘The chicken caught in the crossfire is not only a chicken. It is the reflection of so many Brazilians trapped in an unjust country’.
The voice at the start belongs to Buscapé, known as Rocket, a resident of the favela who dreams of becoming a photographer. Rocket is the film’s narrator; I assume he’s the narrator too of Paolo Lins’s semi-autobiographical novel (also called City of God and first published in 1997), on which Bráulio Mantovani’s screenplay is based. It’s frequent practice, of course, for a screen work to open with a first-person narration to get proceedings underway and to give the audience their bearings. In City of God, however, Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), as well as often being part of the action, is back on the soundtrack every few minutes. Relying on voiceover to this extent feels like an admission of failure to adapt material from the page to the screen. Perhaps also like its source material, the film’s narrative comprises a succession of ‘stories’ of significant people in Rocket’s boyhood (during which he’s played by Luis Otávio) and youth. The overall story ‘depicts the growth of organized crime in the Cidade de Deus … between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s, with the film’s closure depicting the war between the drug dealer Li’l Zé and vigilante-turned-criminal Knockout Ned’ (Leandro Firmino Da Hora and Seu Jorge respectively). I’m relying on Wikipedia for that summary because I still haven’t made it to the end of City of God.
The same goes for plenty of the characters: during the hour that I sat through, the corpse count was prodigious and many of the deaths were gruesome. It wasn’t the violence as such, though, that made me give up again on City of God; it was, rather, the style of the film-making. Fernando Meirelles (with Kátia Lund, credited as ‘co-director’ but who doesn’t get the same ‘billing’ as Meirelles[1]) seems to have decided that – since the audience will take it as read that life in the crime-ridden favela is especially nasty, brutish and short – it must be made as spectacularly grim as possible. From the word go, there’s juddering hand-held camerawork, along with freeze frames, speeded-up bits of action, tilted camera angles, and so on. When directors throw everything at a film in this way you soon suspect they’re aiming not for insight but for impact. In this particular case, the pyrotechnics are more striking – and come across as spurious showmanship – because they proved not to be a Meirelles trademark (not in The Constant Gardener (2005), 360 (2011) or The Two Popes (2019), at any rate). After years of gathering dust on the shelves, I’m afraid our City of God DVD is heading for the charity shop.
28 February 2024
[1] For example, Meirelles alone earned an Oscar directing nomination for the film.