BUT ONLY HOPE...
by
Howard Schumann
It has been estimated that 19% of the population of Rio
de Janeiro live in favelas, shanties crowded onto hillsides not far
from luxurious apartments and world famous beach resorts. Notorious
breeding grounds for poverty, drug addiction, and gang warfare, the
favelas with their picturesque street names like Dead End Hill, have
been the subject of critically acclaimed films such as Hector Babenco’s
Pixote and Fernando Meirelles’ City
of God. Based on a series that ran on Brazilian TV Globo
for four years and was watched by 35 million viewers, Paolo Morelli’s
City of Men is a follow-up to the more flashy
Meirelles film. While it lacks the earlier work’s kinetic energy,
it is more emotionally satisfying and has characters that we care about.
The film focuses
on two friends, both turning 18 and without fathers. The two boys, Acerola
and Laranjinha, (given Americanized names Ace and Wallace in the subtitles)
have unresolved father issues. Wallace is trying to locate the father
he never knew and Ace wants to find out how and why his father was killed.
Actors Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha both appeared in the TV series,
and footage from the show is used for flashbacks during the film, presented
in a faded color palette. Both Silva and Cunha are natural actors who
do a remarkable job. Ace, though only 18, lives with his wife Cris (Camila
Monteiro) in one of the shanties and is the father of a young boy named
Clayton (Vinicius Oliveira). Ace is immature enough to leave Clayton
alone on the beach in an early sequence, but must grow up quickly and
assume complete responsibility for Clayton’s care when Cris takes
a job in Sao Paolo.
Shot
by cinematographer Adriano Goldman, who provides sweeping panoramas
of the hills, mountains, and beaches, the film begins on the top of
Dead End Hill on a day so brutally hot I could feel the sweat gathering
on my forehead. Gang members with handguns and automatic weapons led
by Midnight (Jonathan Haagensen) decide to head down to the ocean, establishing
a perimeter of guards who tell the cops that they are on route. The
emotional center of the film is the relationship between Wallace and
his newly discovered father Heraldo, played with strength and dignity
by Rodrigo dos Santos. Heraldo is out on parole after having served
fifteen years of a twenty year sentence for robbery and murder. The
circumstances of the murder that he committed becomes a central issue
in the relationship between Ace and Wallace and secrets about both of
their fathers' pasts threaten their friendship and lead to their involvement
on different sides of a new eruption of gang violence.
Somewhat
melodramatic but never manipulative or false, City of Men transcends
the familiar format of hand-held camera hyperactivity and gangster clichés
to become a tender and deeply affecting story about abandoned children
and how the cycle is repeated from one generation to the next. While
the film explodes into warfare between rival gangs led by Midnight and
Fasto (Eduardo "BR" Piranha), it is devoid of the usual stylized
and frenetic violence. Ace and Wallace are characters we get to know
and identify with. We want them to defy the odds and survive until adulthood,
though the tragic history of life in the Rio slums is never far from
our mind.
In
Eran Kolirin’s The Band's Visit,
a fully uniformed Egyptian police band arrives in Israel to perform
at the opening ceremony of a new Arab Cultural Center, but no one shows
up to meet them at the airport. Lonely and tired, they take the wrong
bus, ending up in Bet Hatikvah, a lonely outpost in the Negev that,
according to one of its residents, not only doesn’t have a cultural
center but has no culture. Unable to get transportation until the next
morning, the band agrees to stay overnight at a local restaurant run
by Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), a free-spirited but lonely Israeli restaurateur
who longs for companionship.
The
Band's Visit is the story of the small connections that bring people
together. Israeli’s submission as Best Foreign Film at the Oscars
(rejected because much of its dialog is in English), it is about what
some of us have lost in modern society – the ability to reach
across cultural, political, and language barriers to connect with fellow
human beings. Over the course of the evening, the Israelis and the Egyptians
approach each other tentatively, and little by little, the staid Egyptians
open up to their Israeli hosts, finding some common ground exemplified
in a spontaneous dinner table rendition of George Gershwin’s “Summertime.”
When the
two groups begin to get to know each other, they find that beneath the
language and cultural differences, they are simply people - full of
joy and sadness, friendship and loneliness, connection and loss. Tewfiq
(Sasson Gabai), the conductor of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra,
is formal and rigid in his demeanor but is able to strike up a friendship
with Dina. After some awkward silences, the melancholy conductor reveals
details of tragic losses in his family and how he feels that he is to
blame. Another band member, Khaled (Saleh Bakri) decides to accompany
the local youth Papi (Shlomi Avraham) and his date to a roller skating
rink. In a memorable scene, Khaled offers the socially backward Papi
some instructions on courting his shy girl friend.
In another
moving sequence, band member Simon (Khalifa Natour) plays a lovely but
unfinished clarinet composition for for Itzik (Rubi Moscovitz) who tells
him that he should end the piece, not with a traditional showy display
but with what is there for him at the moment, “not sad, not happy,
a small room, a lamp, a bed, a child sleeping, and tons of loneliness."
This is a film about Israelis and Arabs, but without the usual backdrop
of boundary disputes, the peace process, or the religious divide. It
even avoids the clichés about how music is a universal language.
It is a small film, but wise in its understated depiction of humanity’s
common bonds, slow-paced but held together with a sensitive charm.
©2008 Howard Schumann
CineScene
