City of God - Movie Review

City of God

City of God ( port. Cidade de Deus) is a Brazilian film directed by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund. It shows a life chronology of the characters in the Brazilian slums, Rio de Janeiro favelas in the style of social realism. The film also touches on the issue of racial and social inequality in Brazil, since most of its members have pronounced African origin. As of March 28, 2015, it took the 21 place in the list of the best films, according to imdb.com.

The film is largely autobiographical, as the story is told in the first person and put it on real events occurring in the "City of God" (the name of the slums on the suburb of Rio de Janeiro) in the 60s, 70s, and 80s of the twentieth century. The main characters of the film are a guy named "Rocket", who is balancing between privacy and minor offenses with his friend Dadid, who started his career of the gangster at eight. The real name of "Rocket" is Bushkape. He is a black teenager, who is too weak and timid to become a criminal, but quite talented to be a good photographer and a creative person. By his eyes, the viewers see life, love, and death of many heroes, whose destinies intertwine and intersect with the development of the plot.

Two gangster gangs are fighting to the death. A significant portion of gangsters is children. From the very childhood, they are playing not with cars, but with the guns by shooting at the live targets. Growing up, they become the violent killers and collect new fighters in short pants. The most terrible thing in the movie is not the street that is littered with the corpses of children, but the tanned leg, which was shot through the sandals. "Where do you shoot? At the arm or leg?,” the careful and hilarious ringleader of the gang, Little Zee asks at the eight-year-old boy (City Of God).

The City of God is consonant, rather, to the Barrel de Poudre or Magnolia. There is a clever dramaturgical ligature when the first episodic characters suddenly come to the forefront, and events appear in a completely new light; it is built in the basic philosophical principle. Nevertheless, at the first meeting, the characters of Zee, Manet, and Sandro, and even a young gang do not attract any attention either of Bushkape, nor, especially, of the spectator. Only by re-engaging in the whirlpool of events, they become the central characters in the game called Living.

The witty prolog, when Bushkape is between two fires, in the epicenter of the confrontation armed criminals, deserves the special mention. Freeze frame, which is serving as a starting point, by its intra-mounting operation, immediately transfers the action back to the childhood of the main character. It is repeated again closer to the final and overturns the original assumptions. All of this denies in a striking manner the views of the ancient thinkers of the ubiquitous and unpredictable Fate as well