Like Father, Like Sons

Lost boys look for missing dads in the brutal City of Men.

by Cindy Fuchs

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WHO LOVES THE SON? Wallace (Darlan Cunha) and Ace (Douglas Silva) forget Ace's baby boy at the beach and go searching for fun. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Seeking respite from the heat, Madrugadão (Jonathan Haagensen) suggests that his band of gangsters accompany him to the beach. Flies buzz and sweat glistens. The young toughs mock one of their own for sport, then head off to the shore, where indeed, they find wide sky, blue water, "bikinis and nice asses." For a few moments, best friends Ace (Douglas Silva) and Wallace (Darlan Cunha) smile broadly, splashing in the water, relaxed and even a bit happy as they're looking after Ace's young son, Clayton.

These first few moments of Paulo Morelli's City of Men (Cidade dos Homens) focus on the friends' youth and naïveté. Wallace's shyness regarding his crush, Camila (Naíma Silva), and even Ace's self-involved bluster is strangely charming, thanks to Douglas Silva's performance: Now 20, he played the proto-psychopathic Lil Dice in Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's City of God in 2002. The new film, called a "companion piece" to the original, actually draws from characters developed in that film's inspiration, the mesmerizing, Meirelles-produced Brazilian TV series — which explains how City of Men includes scenes of Ace and Wallace as kids (the roles they played on TV for four seasons). Lil Dice was charismatic, if chilling, pretty much the opposite of Ace, who gets by on a combination of warmth and genuine confusion when it comes to pleasing his ex, Cris (Camila Monteiro).

He displays as much when he and Wallace decide suddenly to leave the beach, wholly forgetting about Clayton. Crosscuts between the baby stumbling along the sand and the young father roaming the streets in search of his next adventure underline the disconnect between Ace's past experiences and current self-understanding. Ace has grown up without a father (he was shot to death by a friend), and vows to be a good dad to Clayton, even as he realizes what he's done, then rushes off to recover the baby before Cris finds out. That the gang takes care of the child — or at least hands him off to a much-respected local soccer coach — it becomes clear that children here are pretty much on their own, sometimes treated as playthings, other times forgotten, even used for barter or bait.

This point was made brutally in City of God, as children were coerced by the favela gangsters to patrol streets and kill enemies. In City of Men, less sensational, more conventional but equally moving, the process is more insidious: Childhoods are lost to poverty, hopelessness and dead or absent parents. When Cris informs Ace that she's leaving for Sao Paulo in search of employment, Ace is horrified. What is she thinking, leaving Clayton in his care? Not only does the new responsibility threaten his carousing with various women, he argues, it's unfair: "No one's ever looked after me," he frets, eyes wet with tears and fear.

Ace's anxieties about fathering are refracted in Wallace's search for his own dad, a onetime laborer and soccer player imprisoned when Wallace was a child. Now that he's turning 18, he could use his dad's signature for an ID card; when he and Ace learn that Heraldo (Rodrigo dos Santos) has been paroled, they go on to locate him in a local project. Here the melodrama takes another focus, as Wallace finds himself enamored of the very idea of having a father: They spend a little time together, share a few meals, and suddenly Wallace's options seem almost changed. But even as the boy imagines an existence apart from the gangs, a long-simmering tension erupts into street battles and murder attempts.

When Madrugadão and the bullied Nefasto (Eduardo BR) take sides against each other, stake out territories and allegiances, the kids on the peripheries, like Ace and Wallace, are trapped. Equipped with artillery and hand-drawn maps, the teams take over the alleys and rooftops, as civilians hide as best they can (families of enemies are fair game, as are their homes). But for all the tragedy and brutality, City of Men is shaped by the uneven, difficult rhythms of fathers and sons, the boys' determination to connect across years of pain and legacies of revenge.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

CITY OF MEN (CIDADE DOS HOMENS)

Directed by Paulo MorelliA Miramax release