An unsparing portrait of a sociopathic generation

Rating: Null/10 (17 February 2003)

"After the first death, there is no other" - Dylan Thomas
In Brazil there are 120 million people. 50% of them are under 21. 28 million of them live below the lowest standards set by the International Children's Rights Agency of the United Nations. Last year 7,000 boys from 12- to 22-years old died in shootings. This is the background for the disturbing Brazilian film, City of God, directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. City of God is a "favela" (government housing project) on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro where the Brazilian government dumped undesirables and homeless in the 1960s. The film is based on real events described in a novel by Paulo Lins, who lived in the project for thirty years and spent ten years researching the events. It is an unsparing portrait of a sociopathic generation, where manhood is determined by who can kill the most. When a child is ridiculed for being too young to join one of the gangs, he replies, "I smoke, I snort. I've killed and robbed. I'm a man."

The film traces the favela's history over the span of three decades, showing how its children first became petty thieves, then drug dealers, and finally cold-blooded murderers. To make the film, 2,000 children who lived in the City of God were auditioned and 200 were chosen to go to acting workshops where they improvised the scenes. It is narrated by Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), who survived the gang warfare and has since become a photographer for a local newspaper. The picture opens with the sharpening of knives and an adrenalized chase scene involving gangsters, guns, a runaway chicken and Rocket coming face to face with the feared gang leader L'il Zé (Leandro Firmino da Hora). It then flashes back to the more sedate 1960s, where three friends, Goose, Shaggy, and Clipper, known as the "Tender Trio," engage in small time robberies and use their guns only to threaten. The remainder of the film is divided into chapters, each depicting different characters and time periods, each extending the violence until it reaches manic proportions.
One of the most disturbing scenes involves the holdup of a brothel and the murder of its patrons. A nine-year old named Li'l Dice (Douglas Silva) is told to wait outside while the Tender Trio robs the customers. He is told to shoot a window if the police come; instead, however, he goes on a killing spree with a big smile on his face, massacring the patrons in the middle of their lovemaking. The second chapter contains the most gut-wrenching scene of all, when L'il Zé, pursues a gang of "runts" who are disobeying his rules, cornering two of the small boys in an alley. He gives a gun to a member of his gang known as Steak-and-Fries (Darlan Cunha), telling him to prove his manhood by killing one of the smaller boys. The two boys start crying, allowing us to witness the real fear beneath the bravado. Yet the madness and violence keeps building from there.
City of God is essentially a horror story that hits you with a punch to the solar plexus. It is very powerful, but also desensitizing in its high-tech stylization and dizzying special effects. It becomes so fixated at simulating a cocaine high by jumping from one character to another with breakneck speed that, unlike the 1981 Brazilian film Pixoteby Hector Babenco, it often fails to allow full comprehension of the human aspect involved. Yet the film deserves praise for its honesty in tackling an issue most of us would rather avoid. In the process, it has uncovered the natural raw energy of children, with no place to use it except in self-destruction. It leaves me to wonder how this energy could be harnessed against a system that encourages and perpetuates this cycle of violence.