ALTHOUGH it has the same ghetto setting, two of the same young actors and a similar title, City Of Men is not really a sequel to Fernando Meirelles's intense, Oscar-nominated film, City Of God.
City Of God mixed on-the-run documentary realism with
a jagged sense of dread, and its cast was made up almost entirely of amateur actors, with the discomfiting bonus that they were playing out their ordinary lives in the emotionally and economically impoverished underworld of Rio.
The success of City Of God spawned a Brazilian TV series, also called City Of Men, which picked up the story of two of the children from the first film and ran for four series, during which time the two leads aged from 12 to 16 in the manner of a crime-plagued Wonder Years. The new movie, directed by Paulo Morelli and written by Elena Soarez, draws from both the earlier movie and the TV show, showing the boys' development in fistfuls of flashbacks. Visually, this picture certainly seems to be a cousin of City Of God, with the same bleached-out whites and grainy cinematography, but the mood is closer to a melancholy Latin American telenovela, where frenetic gangster turf wars take a back seat to classic, well-worn themes of fathers and abandoned sons.
The two childhood friends are just turning 18, and baby-faced Ace (Douglas Silva) is already an irresponsible teen father and faithless husband, perhaps – as his lifelong pal suddenly feels he has to unnecessarily explain to him (but really, us) – because his own father died when he was young.
Wallace (Darlan Cunha) is also fatherless, until he has to apply for an identity card and tries to trace his long-lost dad in a bid to avoid being officially stamped illegitimate. As it turns out, his father wasn't hard to find: Heraldo (Rodrigo dos Santos) is a paroled killer who spent the past 15 years in jail for armed robbery. The reconnection is fraught with all manner of disillusionment, causes a rift in Wallace's relationship with Ace, and eventually puts them on the opposite sides of a gang war involving Wallace's cousin Midnight (Jonathan Haagensen), a murderous drug kingpin so paranoid that even a trip to the beach for a swim is a military operation.
In a society of fatherless boys looking for role models, such glamorous outlaws fill the void – yet despite teens swarming around the slumland with machine guns, no one seems that worried, perhaps because in a film with scenes of violence but no gore, the most gruelling moment in City Of Men is one where a woman has her dreadlocks chopped off.
Maybe it was the freshness and ferocious energy of City Of Men that distracted me from noticing it before this brutal haircut, but it's striking how very little interest the two City films have for anything that doesn't sweat testosterone. Women are sullen, serve dinner, get tough or give birth to inconvenient children, but mostly their contribution is silent. The film gets all watery-eyed when Ace and Wallace take Ace's son out, and when crossing a street, both men take the little boy's hand and tell him to look both ways. Well yes: but isn't it also tragic that the girls in this world have to look both ways for themselves?
Propelled by a schematic script, the torn loyalties here get a bit West Side Story, while lessons are learned in the most obvious ways. Still, although the drama is awkward, at least it doesn't plug the gaps with overloaded technique, as the more sensationalist City Of God tended to do. In City Of Men, the grown-up boys from Brazil bring authenticity and emotional intimacy even when the plotting meanders towards contrived sentimentality.
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On general release from FridayThe full article contains 651 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
