I have this large poster from Pop Chart Labs called “100 Essential Films”. There’s a foil cover over each movie, and the idea is you scratch off the foil to represent the movies you’ve seen. As of this typing, I have eight left unseen on there, oddly enough three in a row from 90s, but the last one I wasn’t all that familiar with was the 2002 Brazilian feature film City of God.
That’s on Netflix right now, so I saw no harm in filling in that gap.
Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Paulo Lins, City of God is essentially the story of two boys growing up in the title location, a poor neighborhood just outside of Rio. Most of the male characters in the movie seem to go by a nickname, so we start off the movie (with English subtitles running into the credits, obscuring them a little in places, so be forewarned) with a gang chasing after an escaped chicken, shooting guns at it and not able to catch the rather skinny bird. Finally, the chicken comes to a stop in a street right in front of a young man known mostly as “Rocket”. He’s the film’s narrator. Rocket sees the gang in front of him, hears the cops pull up behind him, and more or less knows if he jumps either way or stays where he is, he’s probably dead.
From there, the movie flashes back to Rocket’s youth. As a boy, his older brother Goose was part of a three-man gang alongside Shaggy and Clipper. Shaggy had a kid brother named Benny, and Benny’s friend Lil’ Dice (later Lil’ Ze) hung out with the threesome as well, offering up ideas of his own. We’re told, early on, that being a hood in the City of God isn’t necessarily hard, but to be a successful hood, you had to have ideas. Lil’ Dice/Ze, he’s an idea man.
He’s also a stone cold killer even as a child, worse than any of the older kids he hangs out with. He’ll personally kill Goose after a score gone wrong, just as Shaggy will himself be killed by the police. Clipper, wising up perhaps, joins the church.
From there, Rocket-as-narrator basically tells two stories: his own and Lil’ Dice/Ze’s. Yes, there are other figures in there, but essentially, we see two paths through the neighborhood. Rocket takes the harder path, that of escape without being corrupted by the drug dealers and violence all around him. Even when he does decide to commit crimes, he ends up not doing so because all his potential victims turn out to be cool people he ends up liking too much to hurt.
By contrast, Lil’ Ze never seemed to meet anyone he didn’t mind hurting and sometimes killing. The one exception is his longtime friend and partner Benny, the coolest and nicest drug dealer in town. Rocket, in his eternal quest to lose his virginity and become a photographer, lives in fear of Ze, knowing if Ze could kill his big brother, Rocket could end up just as dead. As such, Rocket just avoids violence, and he ends up better off as a result. His narration is often amusing and self-depreciating, a kid who couldn’t commit a violent crime if he wanted to, and lives in so much fear of what’s going on that he can’t bring himself to do anything but do right.
I really dug this movie. About the only complaint I had was the subtitles, even telling me what the lyrics were for popular songs playing in the background, which is a bit unnecessary since the lyrics in some cases were in English. Seriously, I know “Kung Fu Fighting” when I hear it. I got the impression the subtitles were for the hearing impaired as much as they were for English speakers since they also listed when music started and what kind of mood the themes were setting up. But the movie itself, showing the never-ending violence that just drags down so many of the residents of a poor neighborhood, is a brilliant work worth checking out by anyone who wants to be a film buff and doesn’t mind reading subtitles.
Grade: A
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