August 28, 2002

City of God
(Miramax) Rated R

Even further from left field came the Miramax film, City of God.  I have to tell you, I had zero awareness of what I was walking into when I got to the screening room.  I knew it was scheduled for Toronto and that Miramax was showing it early… that’s it. 

And all it turned out to be was one of the most impressive directorial debuts in what has been an exceptional few years for directorial debuts.   This film is better than Amores Perros.  This film will be more influential than movies like Chungking Express.  This film suggests that director Fernando Meirelles has even more upside than Christopher Nolan.  This film is the most original synthesis of pop storytelling into a new form since The Matrix.  And this film offers Meirelles managing to top the work of a highly talented and experienced director, Barbet Schroeder, in a similar look at violence, Our Lady of the Assassins. 

I don’t know whether Brazil will off the film up as their Best Foreign Language Academy Award nominee.  But if they do, it’s pretty hard to imagine that any other film will be any better.  It is possible that Oscar voters will turn away from the violence of the story and find something “nicer.”  But that would be a shame.  You never know quite whom you have after just one film, but Fernando Meirelles looks like he could be up on the very, very highest level of directors. 

The title, City of God, is the name of a poverty-stricken area in urban Brazil.  The story is told by one of the many characters we get to know in this story of rising and falling top hoodlums.  This is a world where working people live in fear, where children carry guns, and where hope is a lot more hard to find than a baggie of cocaine. 

This is movie of extreme violence, which will certainly put of much of the audience.  But, like Our Lady of the Assassins, the violence is directly attached to the moral ambiguities of its characters lives.  One of Meirelles strong influences, visually and on the soundtrack, is blaxplotation.  This makes enormous sense, since this is, in its way, a ghetto exploitation film.  Another film it reminded me of was last year’s Toronto attention-getter, Malunde, which told the story of a black street kid in South Africa who hooks up with an older white man.  In what was a pretty soft-hearted film there were shocks, like kids sniffing glue in brown paper bags.  Here, there are entire mini-gangs of kids 10 and under.  But their motivations and the growth of their anarchic attitudes is a key part of the storytelling. 

I was taken, time after time, by the way Merielles wove this story, with a skill that made Pulp Fiction seem simplistic, Memento confusing and Guy Ritchie as shallow as he obviously is.  Meirelles uses time and space and movement with wild abandon and absolute authority.