Film
City of God
- Director
- Katia Lund, Fernando Meirelles
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 135 mins
Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles’ sprawling, ultra-violent, visually and narratively inventive, superbly photographed, slickly edited and extraordinarily well-acted Rio ghetto gangland epic was nominated for four Oscars back in 2002.
Loosely adapted from a gargantuan autobiographical novel by Paulo Lins, City of God follows three main characters and a bunch of peripheral ones over 30 years in the eponymous, ironically named fevela (a low-cost government housing project), as it deteriorates into a dangerous slum riven by drug-fuelled gang warfare. Back in the ‘60s, we meet fun-sized mini-hoods L’il Dice and Bene, a pair of gun-toting pre-pubescents whose character traits are already becoming established. Bene’s the laidback, dope-smoking one, while L’il Dice’s psychosis receives an early release when, bored while acting as a lookout during a motel robbery, he casually shoots dead all the victims, chuckling quietly to himself. During the ‘70s and ‘80s, Dice reinvents himself as L’il Ze (Firmino da Hora), who earns as many enemies as allies in his ruthless domination of the ghetto’s cocaine trade, the various interwoven chapters in the ensuing drama being narrated by his contemporary, Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), who dreams of escaping the slums to become a photographer.
Blackly comic, taboo-busting (you may find the scene where Ze orders the maiming and execution of a whimpering child difficult to watch), and totally engrossing, City of God is an astonishing accomplishment, juggling a huge cast confidently through convoluted flashbacks, flash forwards and digressions, and making effective yet sparing use of Matrix-style visual trickery, without ever pausing for breath or losing sight of the central narrative thread that makes those two-hours-plus glide by so effortlessly. Lund and Meirelles’ succeed in evoking this cycle of violence and desperation without hectoring their audience or reducing their characters to two-dimensional stereotypes. The cast – all amateurs drawn from the fevelas – are without exception entirely convincing. But if any of them deserve to be singled out it, has to be Firmino da Hora. His casually violent and socially insecure psycho Ze, who’s only able to get laid by brutally beating and raping women, makes Joe Pesci look like Macaulay Culkin.
This is the second screening by the newly formed community project East Bristol Cinema. Go here for further information and tickets.
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