Contrast

Rating: 9/10 (25 April 2020)

The better the music, the crueler the story. This is a contrast
The story begins with a chicken, a chicken running under the butcher's knife.
In the slums of Rio de Janeiro, they also carried guns when chasing chickens that had escaped. This is almost an area where the gun does not leave. This place is called "The City of God".
In this urban area, if you choose to be a civilian, then you choose to wait for being robbed; if you choose to be a robber, then you choose to wait for being shot. Which one is better? Many people choose the latter, perhaps because robbery may happen every day, and the shooting only needs to be painful once.
There is no doubt that this is a violent movie. Compared with the "New York Gangs" released at the same time, "New York Gangs" is just a violent sugar-coated movie, and "City of God" is really suffocating, although you can hardly see a drop of red paint in the film. Into the blood.
"City of God" is hopeless. In this sunny city, there are shadows cast by the sun: the police are either incompetent or collaborate with the robbers; people who yearn for pastoral life will only die early, even Zie 's Friends, the coolest and calmest robber in the city, Benny can't escape this fate. Benny is cool. He has beautiful girls and a lot of friends, but he has no life to enjoy. He died under a bullet that was supposed to kill Zie.
The plot of the film is based on real events-this is really a country full of contrasts, passion and coldness coexist, faith and killing coexist. Actually, where is this not the case? It's just a matter of contrast. If you want to live more comfortably, it is better to calm down and be more realistic, just like the fictional narrator Robert in the film, live in it, shoot the reality with the camera, and then sell it to the newspaper. Aside from the social contradictions such as race problems that individuals are unable to reverse, it is best to live in the present and have a clear grasp of reality.
There is another contrast in the film, that is, the darker the skin, the whiter the teeth.