Central Station
Central do Brasil
Walter Salles (1998)
Walter Salles’ latest film, I’m Still Here (2024), featured superb acting from Fernanda Torres in the main role and an exceptional cameo from her nonagenarian mother, Fernanda Montenegro. In March this year, I’m Still Here became the first Brazilian entry ever to win the Oscar for Best International Feature Film (what used to be Best Foreign Language Film) – perhaps that’s why Central Station, which gave Salles his international breakthrough, has now been re-released. Whatever the reason, it was very good to catch up with this film at long last – and, especially, with Fernanda Montenegro’s lead performance, which is as marvellous as its reputation suggests. Montenegro’s portrait of Dora Teixeira – a jaded, crabby retired schoolteacher who belatedly discovers she has a heart – isn’t at all sentimental. The same can’t be said for Central Station as a whole, although it does include other fine things.
The film opens in the title location, Rio de Janeiro’s main railway station, with a montage – a succession of people delivering to camera the words of a letter they want to send but are unable to write. (I’m guessing these are a mixture of real people and actors.) Dora Teixeira is their scribe; she charges a small fee for each letter, extra for postage. The sequence might suggest she’s socially responsible and, in a low-key way, altruistic. Once she has left the station for the day, returning home on a packed commuter train to her unlovely apartment, that impression is quickly dispelled. It emerges that Dora needs the modest letter-writing income to help make ends meet. She takes pleasure, in the company of her neighbour Irene (Marília Pêra), in deriding her illiterate clients or discerning an unattractive subtext to their letter. What’s more, the letters often aren’t sent: Dora throws some straight in the bin, keeps others in a drawer for the time being. One of the latest letters is in the second category, only thanks to Irene’s persuading Dora not to bin it immediately. It’s from a woman called Ana Fontenele (Sôia Lira) who, in the company of her nine-year-old son Josué (Vinícius de Oliveira), dictated to Dora an angry missive to the boy’s father, Jesus, from whom Ana is estranged and whom Josué has never met. Dora tells Irene she thinks Ana, despite her professed anger, is using the boy as a bargaining chip to get the man back.
When she receives a second visit at the station from the mother and son, it seems Dora was right – Ana now wants to send a more conciliatory message. A few minutes later, she is fatally injured in a traffic accident just outside the station; Josué returns to Dora’s pitch alone, his face stained with tears, and she’s strikingly unsympathetic. (I thought improbably unsympathetic, never mind her ingrained asperity.) In the days ahead, though, with the boy still hanging around the station, Dora’s attitude changes. She asks Josué how he’s doing. She offers him a sandwich. She takes him back to her apartment though it’s not long before she delivers him to an adoption broker, assured the boy will be sent to a ‘good family’ in the United States and pleased with the fee the broker pays her. She buys a new television and shows it off to Irene, who’s horrified: she tells Dora no one will adopt a nine-year-old, that Josué will be killed and his organs sold on the open market. In an action-packed sequence unlike anything that’s gone before, Dora returns to the broker and contrives to abduct the boy. She decides to escort him to the town in north-eastern Brazil where, according to the address that Ana supplied, his father Jesus is now living.
The years ahead would confirm Walter Salles’ appetite for road movies: he went on to direct The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and On the Road (2012). As in The Motorcycle Diaries, the journey in Central Station is absorbing because it’s through territory unfamiliar to many viewers (including this one) – in terms of culture as well as geography. From start to finish, Salles describes remarkably rituals both religious and secular. These range from the choreography of young men on Rio public transport literally jumping the huge queue for a train by vaulting in through its windows, to the intensity of Catholic feast day celebrations in rural Brazil. The sense of two emotionally rootless travellers – wary of, often arguing with, each other – is reinforced by the succession of bus journeys, of small bars, bodegas and roadside cafés in vast, dusty landscapes. Even so, Central Station (with a screenplay by João Emanuel Carneiro and Marcos Bernstein from an idea by Salles) conforms to a formula that it’s hard not to think of as a Hollywood formula. An unexpected, accidental, often gruelling series of events enables a self-absorbed, world-weary protagonist to come to care for someone other than themselves, and to discover new meaning in life. In Central Station that someone is a child, which increases the story’s sentimental heft.
Vinícius de Oliveira, who had no previous acting experience, is terrifically effective as Josué. He switches between angelic and petulant at speed. He’s excellent whenever the boy is sparky and resourceful – when, for example, he and Dora are completely out of funds, and Josué sees and seizes an opportunity for her to make pocket money as she used to: he noisily advertises an on-the-spot letter-writing service to a group of villagers. Oliveira is less convincing when Josué is downhearted, as he’s several times required to be. When he hangs his head, he just looks like a kid pretending to feel what Walter Salles has asked him to feel. (Vinícius de Oliveira, whose actual age was twelve when he appeared in Central Station, has gone on to a successful adult career in Brazilian television and cinema, including a leading role in Salles’ 2008 drama Linha da Passe.) In the supporting cast, the standout performance comes from Otávio Augusto as Pedrão, a kindly truck driver who gives Dora and Josué a lift. An evangelical Christian who describes himself as ‘married to the road’, Pedrão stays with the pair until Dora, encouraging him to enjoy a beer and her company, scares him away.
Dora and the boy locate his father’s address but he’s no longer there. The house’s current owner directs them to another area; there’s no sign of Jesus there either but Josué has two half-brothers and one of them, Isaías (Matheus Nachtergaele), a building worker, happens to overhear Dora’s questions to another local. Isaías invites them back to the home he shares with his brother Moisés (Caio Junqueira) and they explain the family history: when their own mother died, their father married a woman called Ana who disappeared to Rio when she was pregnant (they don’t yet realise Josué is the child she was carrying). Isaías and Moisés, both illiterate, ask Dora to read out the letter their father wrote to Ana before he too disappeared, a few months ago – a letter for Ana to see in case she returned. Jesus’s letter, according to Dora’s reading, looks forward to a happy family reunion, including Josué ‘whom I can’t wait to meet’. While Jesus’s three sons are asleep that night, Dora quietly leaves to catch a bus back to Rio de Janeiro. The sound of the front door closing wakes Josué who runs towards the bus stop but too late to prevent her departure.
Two composers share the music credit: maybe Antônio Pinto and Jaques Morelenbaum collaborated but distinct differences between parts of their score make you wonder. As Dora and Josué move through terra incognita, the music is aptly, attractively mysterious; a more lusciously poignant aspect exposes the film’s tear-jerking side. What’s certain is that there’s too much music – less would have been more – which could be a symptom of Salles’ still limited film-making experience at the time (ditto some slack cutting). He nevertheless builds the story to a potent climax. Dora heads back to Rio wearing the blue dress Josué insisted on her getting with money from her renewed letter writing. (The boy, who hadn’t minced words about her ‘ugly’ appearance, tells Dora she looks a lot better when she tries to look pretty.) On her bus journey home, she writes to Josué, assuring him he’ll be happy living with Isaías and Moisés. When she first wore the blue dress, she and Josué posed for two photographs together. Each now has one of these photos to keep and to remember from.
The film ends, in other words, with hope of a more stable future for Josué, hope too perhaps of Dora liking herself, as well as other people, more now that she has experienced a kind of mother love. At the start of the film, Dora is virtually a parasite on the emotional lives of others, lacking an emotional life of her own. As this chilly, often dislikeable woman starts to warm up, the woman playing her makes clear that warming up also means accessing regrets that it was easier for Dora to keep buried. Fernanda Montenegro’s acting throughout is a display of extraordinarily truthful command.
21 August 2025