'City of God' is A Place Where Life is Cheap, But Humanity is Richly Vibrant!

Rating: 10/10 (8 February 2016)

Brazillian director Fernando Meirelles' splashy feature debut is a dynamically exciting portrait of Rio de Janeiro's violent gangs - a blood-spattered, non-stop ride as much into the life of a 'favela' (squatter settlement) as it is into the lives of the youths who inhabit it.
The methodically constructed screenplay is narrated with subjective clarity by Rocket, a young aspiring photographer caught between his deadly surroundings and his treasured sense of ambition. The movie's principal characters, growing up in the Brazilian slum 'Cidade de Deus' in the 60's, are a bunch of drug-peddling, gun-toting hoods hell-bent on revenge - with the notable exception of Rocket, who would rather aim a camera than a shotgun. But Rocket's tale is only one of the dozens of stories 'City of God' juggles with equal aplomb. From the breakneck opening involving a chicken on the lam, the film throbs with several stories: two and a half hours fly by fast and bloody. There's Knockout Ned, a quiet ex-soldier who believes that education and honest work will get him out of the slum. There's Li'l Ze, a vicious drug kingpin with a frozen heart, who erases the Tender Trio's early thug-life template with a psychotically itchy trigger finger. There's Benny, the grooviest hood in the slum, who attempts to retire from Ze's drug game and then there's the hood with my favorite moniker, Steak'nFries, all locked into a headlong dance of sex, drugs, and violence.
City of God is an unmissable cinematic triumph, peopled with affecting characters that avoid cliché, and a familiar story signposted with brutally shocking punctuation. Basing the story on real events and people, the makers employ a host of young non-professional actors residing in the slums where the story takes place, who perform a spectacular job under Fernando Meirelles' brilliant direction. Meirelles illuminates every frame of this fresh, ferocious and indelibly moving film that moves at whiplash velocity thanks to a terse script. He endows each chapter with powerful, uncompromising, beguiling and, sometimes, deceptive momentum. In a film of battering audacity, no shock hits harder than the way Meirelles choreographs murder to a dance beat, an exuberant form of kiddie recreation.
But for all of the story's violent subject matter, there is also much natural beauty to savor thanks to the dynamic cinematography that captures Brazil's magnificent landscape. Every aspect of the filmmaking exists as a virtuosic symphony of theme, character, context, and style. The style is all dazzle and in-your-face pizazz, quick titles, cuts, and digressions, split screens and smash zooms, while a remarkably complex story unfolds and the funky soundtrack grooves along - all that dazzle serves a purpose.
To watch 'City of God' is to become submersed in a hidden culture where life is cheap but the humanity is vibrant. It is a devastating epic about the roots of criminality and the ironic cruelties of life that also works as an intimate personal drama.