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The story about Fernando Meirelles' City of God is that the Brazilian director, faced with the need to cut half an hour from his epic-scale tale of teenage violence in the Rio de Janeiro slums, did so not by eliminating characters or subplots, but by accelerating the whole narrative to the speed of sound, trimming every excess frame until there's nothing left but sinew. The story is probably somewhat true and somewhat false -- it's clear that a number of the movie's showier transitions must have been planned well in advance -- but it accurately conveys the idea that City of God is a whole lotta story crammed into a pretty tight package.

As with Alejandro González Iñárittu's Amores Perros, City of God is a movie plainly aimed at the international market, or at least the winning back of Brazilian viewers who'd rather see Men in Black II than the latest home-grown product. The giddy cross-referencing of Pulp Fiction, the generational sweep of GoodFellas, the shifting film stock and interlocking characters of Traffic, not to mention the celebratory excess of Brian DePalma's Scarface, are all vital elements in Meirelles' potent brew. But no matter how often he stops the action, speeds it up, spins it around or turns it on its head (and that is, make no mistake, pretty often indeed), you never get the feeling he's doing it just for kicks. The kicks happen all on their own.

Like the grating Narc, City of God starts in mid-flight, with a blistering quick-cut montage punctuated by the sound of a knife slicing across a whetstone. Children run through the streets of the Cidade de Deus, one of Rio's many favelas (slums), chasing after a chicken with a fervor that suggests it's to be their only good meal of the day. Without occasion, each of them pulls out a pistol, continuing the chase as if there's nothing unusual about a 10-year-old running down the street with a loaded gun in hand -- and indeed, as we'll see, there isn't. Like Barbet Schroeder's Our Lady of the Assassins, City of God depicts a world rife with gang violence where growing to adulthood is a rarity; the one gangster who lives long enough for his hair to recede seems almost comically ancient, like an old man running through a playground. It's telling that when the movie's most cold-blooded young tough changes street names, he goes from Li'l Dice to Li'l Zé; somehow, you get the feeling he won't live long enough to drop the diminutive.

We meet Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues as a teenager and up, Luis Otávio as a child) in the middle of all this quite literally; he turns a corner, nearly stumbles over that elusive fowl, and finds himself confronted on one side with a mob of gun-wielding kids, and on the other with a handful of loaded-for-bear cops. The longing for a change of locale is pretty acute, and we get it: The world spins, Matrix-style, around Rocket's crouched frame, and we jump back to the 1960s, where a similarly posed Rocket is unsuccessfully tending goal on a dusty soccer field. Presto, change-o.

Narrated by Rocket, the movie makes many such leaps, filling in background material and fleshing out side characters. In one case, the hostile takeover of an apartment that's been a haven for a series of drug dealers rewinds twice -- filling in the apartment's history and the history of the gangster who's about to claim it for his own.

Individually, many of City of God's stands have the feel of stories borrowed from other sources, even if the real source material is a fact-based novel by Paulo Lins, who grew up in the Cidade de Deus. There's the young, ruthless gangster king who rises to the top by virtue of sheer cold-bloodedness; his jovial, softer-edged buddy, who finally plans his exit from the criminal life, with disastrous results; the girls who barely register except when they're wanted for relief (and few of these kids seem to have the time or the testosterone to think about sex); and, of course, the artistically inclined young hero who's in this world but not of it, and always looking for a way out. (When we first see Rocket, he's carrying a camera, and it's his skills as a photographer that open his world beyond the favela's boundaries.) Perhaps the most unusual is the tale of Mane Galinha, translated as Knockout Ned (and played by the samba singer Seu Jorge), an ex-army sharpshooter who goes from token-taker to drug soldier after Li'l Zé rapes his girlfriend and shoots up his house. (We're led to believe it might be Li'l Zé's first sexual experience.) But apart from the age and sheer viciousness of the participants, there's not much here that couldn't have come out of New Jack City, or even Little Caesar.

Where Meirelles excels is in weaving -- and slamming and mashing -- his stories together, constantly spinning us around and setting us down in an unfamiliar spot, so we never get too sure we know what's going on. Even better, he does it without actually sowing confusion, which is, after all, not such a difficult effect to achieve. No doubt, City of God's rapid-fire image assault will turn off some viewers, and just as certainly win over the popcult crowd who love anything with snazzy technique and easily digested characters. But City of God walks the thin line between showmanship and show-off, and gets safely to the other side.

Browse The
January 23, 2003
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