Film review

  • City of God

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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.

     

  • Bob Marley: One Love

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Reinaldo Marcus Green (2024)

    Easy watching and listening but that may not be what Reinaldo Marcus Green was after.  And my reasons for being mildly positive about Green’s Bob Marley biopic are mostly negative.  The rhythm of the Jamaican accents is lovely but the words being spoken are sometimes hard to make out.  This might well be protection against ropy dialogue – a suspicion lodged in my mind thanks to a press conference early on, which comes across loud and clear, and consists almost entirely of clichés.  The reggae beat of the songs is pleasant, too – almost, for me, lulling.  In the concert performances, Kingsley Ben-Adir lip-syncs to Marley’s original recordings[1]; as far as I was concerned, Ben-Adir could have been doing his own singing since I didn’t have a strong sense of Marley’s own voice.  (This made for a very different experience from watching, say, Jamie Foxx lip-sync to Ray Charles tracks in Ray (2004).)  Although I knew what Bob Marley looked like, he wasn’t a strong image in my head either – and I had no idea of how he moved on stage.  Ben-Adir’s Marley is gently charismatic.  It was only in the closing credits sequence, accompanied by footage of an actual Marley concert, that I was made aware of the difference between the movement of the man himself and that of the man I’d been watching in Bob Marley: One Love.  Compared with the manic, ecstatic real thing, Kingsley Ben-Adir looks rather well behaved.

    The screenplay – credited to Terence Winter, Frank E Flowers and Zach Baylin – begins with one peace-promoting concert and ends with another.  In 1976, at the height of violent political conflict in Jamaica, Bob Marley plans ‘Smile Jamaica’ in the hope of bringing harmony between warring factions.  Before the concert even takes place, Marley, his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) and other members of his team, including manager Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh), are shot and injured.  Marley recovers to go ahead with the concert, where he shows the crowd his bullet wounds.  Disillusioned, he heads with his band to London; Rita stays for some time in the US with her children before coming to London too.  One Love ends two years later, with a triumphant homecoming to Jamaica and the ‘One Leave Peace Concert’.  That final news film shows Marley on the concert stage, joining the hands of the Jamaican prime minister, Michael Manley, and Edward Seaga, Manley’s political arch rival.

    Reinaldo Marcus Green’s intervening narrative describes the rapidly increasing international success of Bob Marley’s music, chiefly through his Exodus album – as well as intermittent tensions within Marley’s marriage and entourage, his passion for football, and initial diagnosis of the cancer that would kill him.  (The film’s closing legends report his death in May 1981, at the age of thirty-six.)  There are a few flashbacks to the hero’s boyhood and teenage years (where he’s played by Nolan Collignon and Quan-Dajai Henrique respectively).  There’s often a spark between Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch; both do a good job of conveying the sincerity of their characters’ Rastafari beliefs.  Most of the cast seems to follow Ben-Adir’s lead, with relaxed, low-key playing.  An exception is James Norton, as Chris Blackwell, the record producer and founder of Island Records.  It was a mistake to cast such a strong actor in so thinly written a role:  Norton isn’t bad but, with hardly anything to do, seems to be doing too much.  When Anthony Welsh’s Don Taylor occasionally delivers an up-to-no-good look, the effect is, similarly, too emphatic.

    This adds up to a film that’s likeable, fairly entertaining and thoroughly unsurprising.  It is, despite its musical protagonist, an altogether quieter piece of work than Green’s previous screen biography, King Richard (2021).  Perhaps this is an expression of reverence for its subject:  text on the screen at both ends of the film makes clear enough that One Love is hagiography.  There’s a scene during the London exile in which one of the Wailers plays the theme from Otto Preminger’s film Exodus (1960):  this apparently gives Marley the idea for writing his album of the same name.  Another of the closing legends reports that in 1999 Time magazine named Exodus the best album of the twentieth century.  For me, I’m afraid to say, Bob Marley: One Love was musically exciting only when I heard Ernest Gold’s score for the Preminger picture.

    21 February 2024

    [1] I gather (from a quick Google search) that it’s Ben-Adir’s own voice when Marley sings in less public settings.

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