Friday, February 29, 2008

Movie review: City of Men

... in which the sins of the fathers revert to the sons.

By John P. Meyer

City of Men (Cidade dos Homens)

Growing up in a culture dictated by violence and run by street gangs, teenagers Acerola and Laranjinha have become close as brothers. With their 18th birthdays fast approaching, Laranjinha sets out to find the father he never met, while Acerola struggles to raise his own young son. But, when they suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of a gang war, the lifelong friends are forced to confront a shocking secret from their shared past.

Source: Cinema Source

• Showtimes and more on City of Men (Cidade dos Homens)

City of Men transports North American viewers to a locale that might as well be the surface of an alien planet.

Oh, sure, the views are of Rio de Janeiro, which we've all seen before (at least on television travel programs or in the movies) - but we're peering down at the beachfront luxury hotels and across to Sugarloaf Mountain through the rarified atmosphere of a hilltop favela. The inhabitants of these slap-dash slums - while living out their lives within spitting distance of the palaces of the privileged - are as excluded from those tony, touristy premises as if they were peering at them through a TV screen.

That's why it's so astonishing when Midnight (Madrugadão), the drug lord holding dominion over Dead End Hill, decides on a whim one morning to take a walk down to the beach. His lieutenants - enjoying the view from their concrete slab overlook, lounging about and killing time with small talk - think at first that he must be kidding: we learn later that Midnight hasn't been down off the hill for many moons, due to the danger involved from rival bosses. But he's dead serious, so his motley squad of bodyguards take up their varied selection of small arms (AR-15s, Uzis) and amble along as escort.

Midnight cavorts in the surf with Clayton

It's all downhill from there for Midnight (played by the photogenic Jonathan Haagensen), both literally and figuratively, as his drug king monarchy will soon be challenged and at least temporarily usurped in a violent takeover led by his own right-hand man, who allies himself with a rival drug lord (holding sway over a different hilltop shanty town).

But before all this happens, we become acquainted with the protagonists of our story, Ace (Douglas Silva) and Wallace (Darlan Cunha), both of whom live on Dead End Hill and are about to celebrate their 18th birthdays. Ace is married with child, while Wallace - in order to verify a paternal name for his new of-age ID - is undertaking an all-out search for his long-absent father.

Ace, Wallace and Clayton at the beach

Many of the characters and actors in the film (including all those mentioned thus far) are carry-overs from the long-running television show of the same name. Their familiarity with the roles and comfort level with the subject matter must have been an advantage for them going into this production, helmed by writer/director Paulo Morelli. Indeed, the roles seem to merge so intimately with the characters that they appear to be subjects of a documentary rather than players in a fictionalized drama. Credit the shaky hand-held camera work and grainy film stock for contributing to this effect.

It is during the armed beach party that Ace and Wallace renew their tenuous existing connections with Midnight and his minions. Ace, having been left in charge of his toddler-aged son Clayton while the wife's away at work, packs the kid along to the beach to get a rare glimpse of this king of the hill come down to sea level. Ace clearly considers Clayton more of a burden than a boon, since he sort of forgets about him altogether until he and Wallace arrive back in their neighborhood. D'OH! Fortunately, Midnight grabs the kid up from the surf and carries him back to his hilltop pseudo-estate-cum-fortress. The word-of-mouth grapevine is so well-established on the Hill that it's only a matter of minutes before Ace figures out where Clayton has gotten to.

Nothing says "par-TAY" like automatic weaponry

City of Men illustrates a notable visual difference between favela life and society in, for instance, a North American urban slum, in that the inhabitants of Dead End Hill represent a mix of complexions with no apparent stigmatization imposed on one at the expense of another. Even Midnight's personal entourage includes a blending of races from deepest black to clearly Caucasian, and we're given to understand this is no contrived mixing as might occur in a Hollywood-produced feel-good flick, but rather a representation of the existing order of things.

After much thematic hither and yon, the central issue of the movie coalesces into recognizability: what we have here is a story about fathers and the role they play (and often fail to play) in the lives of their children. Ace's dad was killed years ago while attempting to foil a robbery attempt at the restaurant where he worked, while Wallace's pop (once ferreted out) turns out to have just been released from prison.

Hope the safety's on

Will Wallace succeed in bonding with his new-found father? Will Ace learn the truth about what occurred on the night his father was killed, and will he discover who might have had a part in his father's death? We don't find out until late in the 110-minute game, but there's plenty to keep us engaged in the meantime, what with romantic intrigue (Ace turns the guard shack where he works evenings into a babe-friendly multi-use facility) and the running gun battles played out through twisting byways (reminiscent of a first-person shooter on your game platform of choice). When gunfire erupts in the streets, there's a protocol in play whereby civilians scamper behind the corrugated metal-protected pull-down doors of the nearest neighborhood bodega and wait with their randomized fellow occupants for the battle to play itself out.

While it's not likely to find a wide audience - in part because it deals with realities of social exclusion which many would prefer not to be reminded of - those willing to step outside their mainstream movie-watching comfort zones will not be disappointed in the enterprise.

BUT NOT FOR LONG: "It's good to be Midnight." - Midnight, cavorting in the surf

COMFORT FOOD?: "We shot them all and had enough barbecue for a whole week." - Midnight, re. cats in the parking lot of a local restaurant

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• Arts > Movies / Film > Independent Films