City Of God

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Winning honors and awards around the world, nominated for four Oscars, garnering praise from practically every critic who saw it, and playing in American art houses for over a year and half after its initial release, the 2002 Brazilian/French/American coproduction "City of God" should have made more money. Yet it took in only a little over $7,000,000 at the box office in all that time, hardly enough to pay the caterers had this been a big Hollywood production, though enough to double its own minuscule budget. Maybe it was the somber, depressing, unrelenting subject matter that scared audiences away; I don't know. The important thing at the moment is that DVD allows people another chance to see this emotionally gripping if ultimately frustrating motion picture.

"City of God" is based on the true-life experiences of a Brazilian who grew up in the Rio de Janeiro suburb of Cidade de Deus (City of God), a low-income housing project built in the 1960s several miles outside the city, a project that soon became a drug-infested slum and gangland haven. To grow up there was to experience firsthand the horrors of poverty, murder, and corruption almost on a daily basis.

The film was written by Braulio Mantovani from a novel by Paulo Lins, who presumably represents the fictional main character, Buscape (Alexandre Rodriques), nicknamed "Rocket" and later called Wilson Rodrigues, take your pick, a boy we see grow up in the projects and through his sheer good nature and perseverance turn from a life of drugs and crime into a professional photographer and news reporter. Rocket narrates the story, which switches around among any number of characters, mostly slum kids, over several years, with all of the stories eventually interconnecting.

The movie has a low-budget, documentary feel to it as it describes its action in the style of an American gangland thriller, a "Scarface" or "Goodfellas," but with an even greater sense of reality behind it. Indeed, the film is so brutally realistic, as I say, its violence may be what kept any number of potential viewers away from movie houses. In any case, there is apparently nothing in the film that didn't actually take place in the seventies and eighties in this part of the world, and the cautions the film brings with it can be applied to virtually any impoverished area. With poverty come ignorance and desperation, conditions complicated when governments look the other way.

The movie is divided into half a dozen or more separate stories, all of them independently titled, all of them told in various modes of flashback, and all of them coming together in the end. The first tale is "The Story of the Tender Trio," an account of Rocket's older brother and his friends, who become amateur thieves and robbers in the City of God and surrounding environs. The Cidade de Deus housing project was doomed to failure from the beginning, and the city fathers didn't seem to care. Many families were left homeless due to flooding and arson; there were no paved streets, no electricity, no public transportation. It was, as Rocket says, "as far from the picture postcard Rio de Janeiro" as one could get. When the three young men rob a whorehouse and a number of people wind up dead, Rocket's brother goes into hiding.

The stories are all hard hitting and depressing, none of them intended for the squeamish, to be sure. The movie is not meant to be entertaining in the conventional sense, and there are no actors of star caliber to lighten the mood; yet it's hard not to get caught up in the dilemmas Rocket faces on a daily basis and the terrors everyone faces in such a hell hole.

The next segments, "The Story of the Apartment," "The Story of Li'l Ze," "A Sucker's Life," "Flirting With Crime," "Bene's Farewell," "The Story of Knockout Ned," and "The Beginning of the End," take us step by step through Rocket's entrance first into the world of crime and then, accidentally and ironically, into the world of photography and crime reporting.

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