Wrenching film is both harrowing and exhilarating

Rating: 8/10 (1 February 2005)

There are very few films that can capture what life is really like in virtually unknown areas and even though I have never been to the slums of Rio de Janeiro audiences will undoubtedly get a sense of the horror that takes place there. Story is about the drug wars that take place in the isolated slums in Rio and the central character is a young man named Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues) who acts as our narrator and tells us early on that he always wanted to be a hood. In flashbacks we see in the 1960's that the brother of Rocket who was in a well known gang ended up getting killed which convinces him to try and stay clear of the hoods.
*****SPOILER ALERT***** In the 1970's as Rocket has gotten older he has a dream of being a photographer for a newspaper but the only thing that he can do is help deliver papers. In the slums the city has been divided in two by the drug gangs where on one side you have Carrot (Matheus Nachtergaele) and on the other is Li'l Ze (Leandro Firmino) and a tremendous amount of bloodshed occurs when Li'l Ze wants to kill Carrot and have total control of the city. Rocket takes some photo's that the newspaper ends up publishing and he ends up being the principle photographer when the two sides collide to try and eliminate each other.
This film is directed by Fernando Meirelles who with this effort has made such an impact that only Orson Welles compares with it. This is one of the more violent films that a viewer can watch and at times it is repellent but what really makes this work is the combination of the story and it's exciting visual style. Meirelles can be described as a combination of Quentin Tarantino and Jean-Pierre Jeunet as he shows us the senseless violence but also takes his time giving the back story on each character. One of the more incredible things about the film is the casting of non-professional actors in pivotal roles with some of them actually being real gang members! This film is considered so important that the President of Brazil applauded it and went on to try and start some reform to clean up the crime in the slums. With it's violent and unflinching look at a part of the world that most of us could never conceive of Meirelles still manages to enthrall us in this extremely well made film and shows everyone that he's a director of rare talent.