City of God - Movie Review

I just have to write about this authentic, gripping movie I saw recently, called City of God. It is one of those works which can be most appropriately described as a tour de force. It was an intense experience which left me drained and exhilarated by the time I finished watching it. The authentic realism of the movie was draining, the artistic cinematic quality of the movie was exhilarating.

The movie is apparently based on a true story, set in a true place, a slum in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro, a slum called "City of God". The tagline of the movie says, "Fight and you'll never survive... Run and you'll never escape". That pretty much sums up life in the slum. The story is about a couple of boys, who grow up to be barely men. One of them fights, and the other longs to run to a better life. Will the former survive? Will the latter escape? You'll have to watch the movie to find out.

The main focus of the movie is not about showing the struggles, the ugliness of the life in the slums. The main focus is to simply tell a great story. The struggles and the ugliness, the violence and the desperation are revealed in the context of the story. It is a gangster movie unlike any gangster movie you've seen before and will probably see again. The story is highly interesting and entertaining. It effortlessly captures our attention from beginning to end, keeping us wondering about what happens next.

When the movie starts, the protagonist of the story is one the verge of witnessing a street shootout between a drug-dealing gang and the police. Both sides have their guns drawn ready to fire (bottom half of the DVD cover picture shown above), and our guy finds himself planted right between them with nothing but his camera. Before we know what happens next, the story is narrated in a flashback, from the time when the main characters are boys, barely 7 years old, watching/participating in the life of petty crimes their brothers lead. The story follows them as they grow up (never seeming to cross 20 years of age), one of them becoming the most violent and feared drug dealer in the city, while the other struggles to keep himself out of trouble and follow his dream to be a photographer. The lives of the two boys are interwoven with each other, and with the lives of several others (most of them also boys) who come in, and go out or die, mostly die. The story is narrated with great skill, never losing or floundering the different narrative threads which are interwoven, always keeping them taut and just right. There are half a dozen or so separate narrative threads, each with it's own title. There are times when the same events are shown from different angles, as different threads come together and culminate at one point of time and space. The whole saga finally comes to a dramatic climax in a street shootout in broad daylight.

It is a movie about crime and violence among drug dealers. The story seems to happen in a different planet, a different reality because of how far removed the life depicted in the movie is from the kind of life most urban people in today's world know. I have seen science fiction movies which are more believable, which seem to be more in the realm of possibilities than some of the scenes in this movie. The violence is relentless and realistic from beginning to end. Some of the scenes are very disturbing and heart-rending. The movie shows kids who are not even into their teens doing drugs, dealing drugs, looting and shooting. The whole movie is indeed about kids, young and old. All the main characters never grow up to look (nor behave) like adults. That renders a sickly, tragic air to the whole drama. And despite the realism, it also makes the story hard to believe.

Yet, when I watched the special feature that came on the movie DVD, I realized that everything shown in the movie was all too real. The special feature is a 56-minute documentary made in the late 1990's, called "News from a Personal War", about the drug scene in the slums of Rio. The documentary starts by mentioning that a person dies in Rio every half an hour, and 90% of those deaths are due to violence! And then it goes on to show interviews with real people, involved in exactly the kind of life as shown in the movie. The documentary had interviews with kids who dealt drugs and killed people, families, policemen. It showed real police shootouts with the dealers and arrests. It went beyond what is impersonally reported in the news. It showed the personal face of the drug war, the personal perspective of every party involved. 56 minutes of crazy stuff!

City of God is a masterpiece of a movie, made mostly with amateur actors and the dialogs are supposedly in the authentic slum slang of Rio. The movie has received top reviews from all corners. This is not a movie to be missed.

City of God page on RottenTomatoes.com has links to all the reviews and movie info.