KIDS AND CARNAGE
by Howard Schumann
"After the first death, there is no other." --
Dylan Thomas
In Brazil there are 120 million people. 50% of them are
under 21. 28 million of them live below the lowest standards set by
the International Children's Rights Agency of the United Nations. Last
year 7,000 boys from 12- to 22-years old died in shootings. This is
the background for the disturbing Brazilian film, City of God,
directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund.
City of God is a "favela" (government housing project) on the outskirts
of Rio de Janeiro where the Brazilian government 
dumped undesirables and homeless in the 1960s. The film is based on
real events described in a novel by Paulo Lins, who lived in the project
for thirty years and spent ten years researching the events. It is an
unsparing portrait of a sociopathic generation, where manhood is determined
by who can kill the most. When a child is ridiculed for being too young
to join one of the gangs, he replies, "I smoke, I snort. I've killed
and robbed. I'm a man."
The
film traces the favela's history over the span of three decades, showing
how its children first became petty thieves, then drug dealers, and
finally cold-blooded murderers. To make the film, 2,000 children who
lived in the City of God were auditioned and 200 were chosen to go to
acting workshops where they improvised the scenes. It is narrated by
Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), who survived the gang warfare and has
since become a photographer for a local newspaper.
The
picture opens with the sharpening of knives and an adrenalized chase
scene involving gangsters, guns, a runaway chicken and Rocket coming
face to face with the feared gang leader L'il Zé (Leandro Firmino da
Hora). It then flashes back to the more sedate 1960s, where three friends,
Goose, Shaggy, and Clipper, known as the "Tender Trio," engage in small
time robberies and use their guns only to threaten. The remainder of
the film is divided into chapters, each depicting different characters
and time periods, each extending the violence until it reaches manic
proportions.
One
of the most disturbing scenes involves the holdup of a brothel and the
murder of its patrons. A nine-year old named Li'l Dice (Douglas Silva)
is told to wait outside while the Tender Trio robs the customers. He
is told to shoot a window if the police come; instead, however, he goes
on a killing spree with a big smile on his face, massacring the patrons
in the middle of their lovemaking. The second chapter contains the most
gut-wrenching scene of all, when L'il Zé, pursues a gang of "runts"
who are disobeying his rules, cornering two of the small boys in an
alley. He gives a gun to a member of his gang known as Steak-and-Fries
(Darlan Cunha), telling him to prove his manhood by killing one of the
smaller boys. The two boys start crying, allowing us to witness the
real fear beneath the bravado. Yet the madness and violence keeps building
from there.
City
of God is essentially a horror story that hits you with a punch
to the solar plexus. It is very powerful, but also desensitizing in
its high-tech stylization and dizzying special effects. It becomes so
fixated at simulating a cocaine high by jumping from one character to
another with breakneck speed that, unlike the 1981 Brazilian film Pixote
by Hector Babenco, it often fails to allow full comprehension of the
human aspect involved. Yet the film deserves praise for its honesty
in tackling an issue most of us would rather avoid. In the process,
it has uncovered the natural raw energy of children, with no place to
use it except in self-destruction. It leaves me to wonder how this energy
could be harnessed against a system that encourages and perpetuates
this cycle of violence.
Shelved
for over a year because Miramax thought it was unpatriotic, The
Quiet American, directed by Phillip Noyce, was finally released,
only after favorable critical reviews at the Toronto Film Festival.
This release is very timely, with the U.S. government seemingly bent
on another unpopular war on a third world country. Based on Graham Greene's
1955 novel, the picture looks at America's clandestine involvement in
dirty tricks in Vietnam prior to the French defeat in 1954. Because
of its political relevance, this is a film that I desperately wanted
to love; however, I found that I could not fully embrace it. It never
develops its themes with sufficient force to make clear the full impact
of U.S. policy, or what the issues were really about.
The
film is set in Saigon in 1952 during the latter stages of the war between
the French and the Viet Minh Communists. Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine)
is a world-weary British journalist on assignment in a Saigon where
bombs continually go off in random horror. The body of an American,
Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) is found floating in the river, and the
French police launch an investigation. It then recounts the events that
led to the murder.
Fowler
(in true Bogart fashion) claims he is just a neutral reporter and doesn't
want to get involved in politics. He spends his time smoking an opium
pipe and writing perfunctory dispatches to the head office: "I wrote
what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action,"
he says. Although married to a strict Catholic who lives in London,
Fowler is in love with a young Vietnamese girl named Phuong (Du Thi
Hai Yen). Things get complicated when Pyle, an idealistic young American,
shows up claiming to be in Vietnam on a medical mission, and saying
that America as only interested in bringing democracy to Vietnam. 
A
love triangle eventually develops when Pyle tells Fowler that he has
also fallen in love with Phuong, and wants to marry her and bring her
back to Boston. The conflict becomes heated through the course of the
film, but it is unclear if Phuong is really in love with either man
or is just using them. When Fowler discovers a massacre of civilians
at Phat Diem that cannot be traced to either the Communists or the French,
he investigates further, and the trail leads him to unpleasant revelations.
There is a lot to like in The Quiet American. The
film has a conscience, and Noyce's use of Vietnamese amputees as extras
graphically communicates the agony of what war does to people. Michael
Caine is excellent as the weary, cynical reporter trying to reconcile
ethics with practicality, 
and the film has the courage to follow Greene's novel closely (unlike
the 1958 distortion by Joseph Mankiewicz). Unfortunately, I found the
performance of Brendan Fraser as Pyle to be unconvincing, either as
a lover or a political operative, and the entire romantic subplot seems
peripheral and lacking focus or passion. The film ends with a montage
of newspaper clippings about American involvement over the next two
decades, but its impact is muted. It is not made clear that U.S. meddling
in the fifties led directly to the establishment of the puppet regime
of Ngo Dinh Diem years later, the same kind of "third force" depicted
in the film. For those of us with short memories, this regime led to
the Buddhist immolations, the Viet Cong, Diem's eventual assassination,
and ten years of napalm and broken bodies. The Quiet American
comes to life briefly, then loses its footing, never meshing into a
coherent and satisfying whole, either as a romance, a character study,
or a political statement. At the end, it captures the mind but not the
heart.
©2003 Howard Schumann
CineScene
