city of god

If you can squirm past the start wherein a chicken's head is neatly trimmed from its body, you can probably stomach the following scene wherein our boy hero, Rocket, is caught between a line of Rio de Janeiro cops gripping firearms and the brooding Rio de Janeiro gang sweating in their crosshairs. Warning: I could not make it past this scene when my brother tried showing me this film a year ago. Since, I suppose, I've matured. Or, I suppose, I had recently seen Oldboy—a violent-for-the-shock-value-of-the-thing thriller about Revenge.

Revenge also builds the walls of the City of God, a housing project outside the city whose unpaved, yellow streets remind one of Babar's illustrations for Celesteville more than a "slum" (as the inhabitants refer to their hometown). Crime here is the only way to get ahead, blah blah blah, and the film startles an audience into rapt attention with a series of gorgeously gruesome crimes culminating in the serial murder of all of the guests in a local Motel. Basically, as my couch-sharer said, "This is not an advertisement for Rio De Janeiro." Uh, no. It seems as though everyone in the film gets shot, especially Little Dice, a seven year old child who does most of the shooting.

However, what makes the City of God great is that the violence doesn't speak for itself, doesn't linger as a statement, doesn't claim to be out of the ordinary cycle of human events: It is commanded within the quaking tone of the film as simply an extension of the quick cuts, of the sun's match flare against the lens. Simply put, there is no other way to tell the story of a boy, Rocket, who escapes from this mess by photographing it. Rocket is just like us: he fears the violence, sees it for what it is, and will only survive by escape. The photographs he snaps then, for the local paper, are that form of escape: The violence exists whether we see it or not, but we can only control its movements through film.