City of God — Film Review
“If you run, the beast catches you; if you stay, the beast eats you.”
A tagline that summarizes the plight of growing up in the favela known as, the City of God, where a vicious drug dealer Li’l Zé rules. The film centers around, Rocket, a quiet and humble boy who tries to remain neutral in between the gang violence of Li’l Zé and his rival, Carrot. Rocket narrates the film and his voice primes the audience for a film where the environment and its characters are effortlessly linked together and constantly evolving. The city and its inhabitants are introduced on a busy sunny day, kids are playing, and new families are moving in. The homes are tiny yet the use of wide-angle street-level shots gives the impression that this world is open to roam. The film’s bright environment, in the beginning, is a reflection of the life its first characters Shaggy, Goose, and Clipper (also known as The Tender Trio) expects to have. The optimism is short-lived, however, as a series of amateur lootings led by Shaggy and his friends, Goose and Clipper, lead to a life of more serious robberies and eventually drug dealing.
Rocket’s activities include fairly prototypical coming-of-age story elements such as smoking joints, taking photos of his friends, and trying to lose his virginity. He is aware of the dangers of the gang life that those around him have chosen, but he never himself succumbs to it. The opposite of Rocket is Lil Dice. Lil Dice is a boy, around Rocket’s age, who sees the looting performed by The Tender Trio as inspiration. The once innocent plundering seen as a leisure activity for most of the boys becomes for Lil Dice a way to gain money and power. Lil Dice’s gangster mentality is developed early on in the film. While smoking a joint with The Tender Trio he says, “To be a real hood you need more than just a gun, you need ideas”. Lil Dice’s ideas all revolve around how to maintain the firmest control over the City of God, whereas Rocket’s energy is focused on escaping it. Lil Dice’s character disappears momentarily in the film and he is later reintroduced to the audience, as Lil Zé. Rocket is not alone in this venture as other prominent characters aspire to make it out. As the film progresses, its color palette shifts from light to dark. The once seemingly endless orange and yellow glow that covered everything in the film’s first act shifts to a to a murky green, dark blue, and eventually consistent black shadow. The film also cleverly adjusts the spaces the characters walk through from tall and wide favelas to bleak ally ways.
Although the timeline of the film is fairly straight forward, the film relies heavily on montage and flashbacks, both which are excellently used to tell the story. In one instance, the entire history of the previous owners and dealers of the apartment that Li’l Zé currently deals out of is explained in a very concise 2–3 minutes. What City of God excels at is creating a world where every minute with its characters feels more important than the last. While Rocket stands out in terms of being the narrator and one of the few characters that chooses not to participate in a life of crime, most of the film’s characters are treated with equal importance. Several characters are given thorough backstories, which when narrated by Rocket, are presented like chapters within a novel. Paulo Lins’s novel of the same name inspired the film. While the genre of the film and novel could conveniently be categorized as a crime story, the story goes beyond violence and drugs.
Layered in between the homicides are moments of pure human contact. In one scene two of Lil Zé’s partners, Benny and Tiago, have a bicycle race and then they buy matching outfits. There are two large dance parties that feature the music of James Brown. Rocket gushes over a girl named Angelica as the two have a tender moment on the beach. This beach scene is critical as it introduces Rocket’s passion for photography. Rocket takes it up as a hobby but it’s through photography that he eventually develops a meaningful life beyond the everyday turmoil in the city. After getting hired at a newsroom he says, “Maybe I was going to die, but now I had a camera”. Rocket’s perspective of his city is never judgmental and he invites audiences to see the world he lives in as it is.
