City of God (Portuguese: Cidade de Deus) is a Brazilian crime film directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, which received four Academy Award nominations in 2004 for Best Cinematography, Best Directing, Best Editing and Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) .
City of God churns with furious energy as it plunges into the story of the slum gangs of Rio de Janeiro. At a full-throttle pace and exciting from beginning to end, the film grab hold of your attention and don’t let go.
The film has been compared with Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” and it deserves the comparison. Scorsese’s film began with a narrator who said that for as long as he could remember he wanted to be a gangster. The narrator of this film seems to have had no other choice.
The movie takes place in slums constructed by Rio to isolate the poor people from the city center. They have grown into places teeming with life, color, music and excitement–and also with danger, for the law is absent and violent gangs rule the streets.
City of God is not only about a Brazilian issue, but one that involves the whole world.
About societies which develop on the outskirts of our civilized world. Of the opulence of the first world, a world that is no longer able to see the third or fourth world, on the other side, or deep down in the abyss.
The main character in Cidade de Deus is not a person. It is a place. Cidade de Deus is a poor housing project started in the 60’s that became one of the most dangerous places in Rio de Janeiro by the beginning of the 80’s.
In order to tell the story of the place, the film tells us the stories of many characters. But all is seen through the eyes of the narrator: Rocket, a poor black kid, too frail and scared to become an outlaw but also to smart to be content with an underpaid job.
He grows up in a very violent environment. The odds are all against him. But he discovers he can see the reality with a different eye: the eye of an artist. Eventually he becomes a professional photographer. That is his redemption.
In the virtuoso sequence opening the picture, a gang is holding a picnic for its members when a chicken escapes. Among those chasing it is Rocket , the narrator. He suddenly finds himself between two armed lines: the gang on one side, the cops on the other.
As the camera whirls around him, the background changes and Rocket shrinks from a teenager into a small boy, playing soccer in a housing development outside Rio. To understand his story, he says, we have to go back to the beginning, when he and his friends formed the Tender Trio and began their lives of what some would call crime and others would call survival.
The technique of that shot–the whirling camera, the flashback, the change in colors from the dark brightness of the slum to the dusty sunny browns of the soccer field–alert us to a movie that is visually alive and inventive as few films are.
Meirelles began as a director of TV commercials, which gave him a command of technique and trained him to work quickly, to size up a shot and get it, and move on. Working with the cinematographer Cesar Charlone, he uses quick-cutting and a mobile, hand-held camera to tell his story with the haste and detail it deserves. “City of God” conveys the authenticity of a cinéma vérité scrapbook.
As Rocket narrates the lore of the district he knows so well, we understand that poverty has undermined all social structures in the City of God, including the family. The gangs provide structure and status. Because the gang death rate is so high, even the leaders tend to be surprisingly young, and life has no value except when you are taking it. There is an astonishing sequence when a victorious gang leader is killed in a way he least expects, by the last person he would have expected, and we see that essentially he has been killed not by a person but by the culture of crime.
Yet the film is not all grim and violent. Rocket also captures some of the Dickensian flavor of the City of God, where a riot of life provides ready-made characters with nicknames, personas and trademarks. Some like Benny are so charismatic, they almost seem to transcend the usual rules. Others, like Knockout Ned and Lil Ze, grow from kids into fearsome leaders, their words enforced by death.
The movie is based on a novel by Paulo Lins, who grew up in the City of God, somehow escaped it, and spent eight years writing his book.
City Of God will always be remembered for its inventive editing and a cast that includes some 200 non professional actors. To ensemble a perfect cast, the director Fernando Meirelles and the co-director Katia Lundi auditioned nearly 2000 children, and then about a hundred children and youths were hand-picked and placed into an “actors’ workshop” for several months in an environment similar to what we see in the film.
In contrast to more traditional methods (e.g. studying theatre and rehearsing), it focused on simulating authentic street war scenes, such as a hold-up, a scuffle, a shoot-out etc. A lot came from improvisation, as it was thought better to create an authentic, gritty atmosphere. This way, the inexperienced cast soon learned to move and act naturally.
In its actual level of violence, City of God is less extreme than Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, but the two films have certain parallels. In both films, there are really two cities: the city of the employed and secure, which are served by law and municipal services, and the city of the castaways, whose alliances are born of opportunity and desperation. Those who live beneath rarely have their stories told.
City of God does not exploit or condescend, does not pump up its stories for contrived effect, does not contain silly and reassuring romantic sidebars, but simply looks, with a passionately knowing eye, at what it knows.
City of God is not the easiest film to watch, but it is a masterpiece all the same, the best crime drama since the Godfather films.
