The New Master of the Pen Camera.

Rating: Null/10 (4 December 2002)

The first half hour of "City of God" shocks us because of the subject matter and the style in which the director tells his story and puts it on-screen.

First of all, the subject matter is very compelling. The film takes place entirely in one of these modern "ready made" suburbs that the Brazilian government built in the sixties to house poor and/or homeless people. As we can easily imagine, it was mostly a political tentative on the side of the government, rather than a genuine gesture to provide aid.
The film follows a bunch of kids who are growing up in this environment, trying to survive. With that, they have to choose between either the traditional life of a poor worker, or that of a smuggler and thief. Street gangs control the neighborhoods, and the kids become involved very early on. The film takes us into this hurricane of violence, following mainly two of these kids, one who's shy and wants to become a photographer, and the other who's violent and wants to become King of the streets. This first part sweeps us along in an admirable way, as we're invited inside their family lives, and their struggles for survival, education, etc. We see how impossible it is, unless one is tremendously lucky, to arrive at a normal life in this kind of situation. The style is more than compelling on two levels: the storytelling which uses the narrative voice of our kid photographer, who endears us with stories of those most important who participated to his coming of age journey.
Even if today a non-linear approach is more than fashionable, it works here, and the director has been able to master it to a degree of perfection. More importantly, his visual style starts were "Amores Perros" left off, and it is as much in your face, raw and cinematically violent as its predecessor. It even goes one major step further: Meirelles has some distance with his subject, in the same way that the main character has with his own story (which is a brilliant transposition) and is more able than Iniarritu, to use cinematic violence constructively in order to bring us inside the true violence of the streets. For example, the opening scene (which is the end of the film) plunges us inside street violence... but the violence is of a chicken being chased, only to be caught and cut to pieces in an alley. That's why this movie is a shocker. Very rarely directors are able to combine a great story, great storytelling and a wonderful new visual style, all perfectly coherent. Is it a masterpiece? Almost. The movie is 130 minutes long, and for 130 minutes our extremely talented director will make sure that we hang on tight to the edge of our seat with his storytelling and our appreciation of his style and mastering of the cinematic medium. Unfortunately, there is a moment when we have to ask ourselves how many kids can we watch kill each other, and how many new "special effects" does the director still have in his bag of tricks? It is clearly very hard to maintain such a level of intensity at both levels for more than two hours, and our director is trying a bit too hard. If the movie were 20 minutes shorter I would dare to call it a masterpiece. Nevertheless, it will definitely become one of this year's major sensations, and will probably be studied by cinema students for decades to come.

It is definitely a film to watch and watch again in order to learn how far we can go with a pen camera. It is definitely a director to remember. He will, without a doubt, become one of the most important directors of the next decade.