Sincere, but avoiding difficult questions:
By Joanne Laurier
3 March 2004
City of God, directed by Fernando Meirelles; screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani, based on the novel by Paulo Lins.
Over 500 shantytowns or slums, known as favelas, exist within the confines of Rio de Janeiro, comprising more than a third of the city’s population. The word favela specifically refers to a community whose inhabitants neither own nor have formal permission to occupy the land. Rio’s favelas were constructed in a period of rapid industrialization to keep the poor isolated from the city’s center.
City of God (Cidade de Deus), a film by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, attempts to portray the horrors of life in the favela known by the same name. The movie spans three decades: from the late 1960s, when the favela originates and its youth enter adolescence as petty thieves, to the 1970s and 1980s when the characters grow up to become first minor, than major drug lords. In a recent interview, Meirelles explained, as an update to his film, that the drug trade has been so consolidated in Rio that currently all the favelas have fallen under the control of three criminal factions.
The film’s 1960s sequence depicts the adventures of teenage bandits known as the Tender Trio, and is narrated by Rocket, the younger brother of one of the featured hoods.
The trajectory from gas-truck hijacking to robbery and murder in a brothel ends in either death or hardened criminality. Cocaine supplants marijuana, and the weaponry becomes increasingly more lethal.
The 1970s segment focuses on the murderous activities of rival gangs who initiate a reign of terror on the neighborhood. The most notorious drug boss, Li’l Zé (known in the 1960s as Li’l Dice), murders and rapes with such abandon that peaceable residents, such as Knockout Ned, join the gunmen of Li’l Zé’s arch nemesis, Carrot. City of God is soaked in blood as a new wave of pre-teen gangsters called the Runts begin to overrun Li’l Zé’s turf.
The filmmaker sees his story as “the beginnings of drug dealing in Rio de Janeiro, a violent story, without hope, which took place entirely inside a favela” [emphasis added]. The favelas exist as a moral vacuum, offering only gangsterism, an early death or the rare escape into middle class life (Rocket). Given the limited scope of the director’s vision, he cannot avoid romanticizing the young gangsters and their “camaraderie,” despite the “rawness” of the film.
A January report in Aljazeera.net regarding children of the favelas involved in Brazil’s drug wars presents a more rounded and concrete picture. Rafael, who at age 15 was a drug soldier, explained: “I carried an assault rifle. If the police came, we had to shoot them; kill them or they would kill us. The government wouldn’t do anything for us, so we took things into our own hands. We lived in a poor community with day-to-day violence and drugs, police shootings and bandit shootings. My hero was a drug dealer (traficante). I saw him every day, armed and committing assaults. The traficantes help the community in a way that the government doesn’t. When my family didn’t have bread or money, it was the traficante who helped. So I became an armed soldier [for him].”
Undoubtedly, City of God is sincere in its desire to call attention to the monstrous inhumanity perpetrated against Brazil’s youth “of the abyss.” However, by virtue of its political and historical omissions, Meirelles’s work runs the risk of reinforcing a social mood that views the conditions of the poor as wrenching but unalterable. This works against a genuine understanding of the essence of life in the favelas, a prerequisite for pointing the way to the abolition of the social conditions that breed them.
Read the full article @ wsws.org
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