At the 30 minute mark, I realized that my body was tense, as if bracing for impact. I forced myself to relax, and made a mental shift to a more passive form of spectatorship. I knew there would be no happy endings here, and to expect them was to set myself up for perpetual disillusion. Despite this, I couldn't help the heartbreak whenever one man (or more often, child) was killed, and the other turned into a killer.
The essence of film has always been wordless; the first moving pictures were bound to silence by the technology of their time, forcing filmmakers to convey emotion sans dialogue. City of God is by no means a quiet film, but it just happens to be that the scenes which say the most— a child in a motel, a boy trapped between two sides of one blade, a chicken escaping the slaughter— say everything they need to say without speaking at all.
City of God has some of the best camerawork and editing I have ever seen. With each movement, the camera makes sure you know exactly what to feel: here, fear; here, panic; here, anger; here, pain. The pace truly is explosive, and the performances are so engaging I genuinely refuse to believe the cast consisted primarily of amateurs.
Here, we are presented with a politics of masculinity that is so brutally ugly it's truly difficult to look it in the eye; what are you supposed to say to a child who wholeheartedly believes that "I smoke, I snort. I've killed and robbed. I'm a man." is a universal truth? The use of violence here is truly masterful; it is void of the theatrical dramatization and subsequent glorification of death and suffering that Hollywood is notorious for, and instead, we see violence from the point of view of the imperialized rather than the imperialist: as something dirty, vile, and miserable, a plague inescapable in its relentless expansion, always growing, always consuming, bloodthirsty and impossible to appease.
Meirelles and Lund begin with the finale, firmly establishing a fundamental theme that weaves its way into the essence of the film: if you are unlucky enough to be trapped within Cidade de Deus, then you are the chicken, born and bred for the slaughter yet still desperately hungry to escape a violence of mythical proportions, one which will never, ever leave your shadow.
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