THE NEW BRAZILIAN IMPORT City of Men, like its 2003 companion City of God, achieves what so many films detailing slum life, no matter their provenance, never quite can — balance and distance. Either we have Boyz N the Hood, which softens the blows by focusing on do-gooders momentarily caught up in it, thus providing characters with whom those of us outside the fray can artificially “identify.” Or we have Menace II Society, which sprays the screen with bullets and blood, thus reducing the world it depicts to a nihilistic void, a momentary rupture in the space-time continuum, soon to be sewn back up. Neither keep it real.
With both approaches, the audience is absolved of the responsibility to consider its connection to these cities within cities. Boyz is too far away, and Menace is too close. South Africa’s Tsotsi, which won 2006’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, almost reaches a level of honesty its American counterparts don’t with its story of a young gangster in Johannesburg, but it pulls back near the end, as if afraid of its own shadow.
Not so with City of Men. Director Paulo Morelli (who also shares story credit) has a reportorial eye for facts and creating order out of chaos similar to that of Fernando Meirelles’ in City of God (he’s a producer this time), allowing the details of the Darwinian social order in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to speak for themselves, sans commentary or heedless foray into the abyss. The result is a crime-thriller that journeys to the dank, dark below not to unearth a magical white light of hope, nor to revel in its own horror, but to simply to tell it like it is.
Morelli and his cinematographer Adriano Goldman open by swooping in from above on their setting, Dead End Hill, one of hundreds of spontaneously erected — and often combusted — shantytowns. The shot reveals a clay, brick and tin morass spread over mountains high above the megalopolis of Rio. Inside this humid and tumid — and properly named — favela are life-long pals Ace (Douglas Silva) and Wallace (Darlan Cunha, who, along with his co-star, also acted in City of God), just two of many ants scrambling on the mound.
While both teens are on the verge of adulthood, they’ve long lived as men, forced by their environment and circumstance to deal with situations they’re not necessarily equipped to handle, let alone understand. As a young father, for example, Ace is often overwhelmed by his responsibility. Wallace, for his part, never knew his dad, and, now that he’s about to turn 18, desperately wants to find him, a search that may spell doom for Wallace and his friend, as we learn everyone in the favelas is connected, and every action has an equally brutal reaction.
What Ace and Wallace do comprehend, however, is the power of the gang that lords over their neighborhood. Morelli and Goldman introduce this heavily armed assemblage of wayward adolescents with a hyperactive flair, a visual testament to both the chaos of thug- and slum-life. Wallace’s cousin Midnight (Johnathan Haagensen) is the leader, and though his grip on power is slipping in the face of a rebellion from his former under-boss Nefasto (Eduardo BR), he never steps back to consider it. His existence isn’t preserved by thinking.
Indeed, Morelli and screenwriter Elena Soarez never allow any of their characters to wax philosophical about the precarious nature of their existence or the forces behind it a la Boyz and Menace, because the insularity of the favela doesn’t allow for a knowledge that reaches beyond its borders. So when a gang war erupts, Ace and Wallace don’t go limp with reflection; rather, they come alive with action.
And for all the violent death and somber reminders that hell isn’t beneath us but right on top, that’s what City of Men is — alive.
City of Men
Douglas Silva, Darlan Cunha, Johnathan Haagensen. Directed by Paulo Morelli.
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