Country: Brazil
Director: José Padilha
Time: 1 hour and 58 minutes
What It Elicits: Social critique, a lot of tension, and musings on invisibility
Where Can I Get It: Internet (free) and Kanopy (w/subscription)
Brazilian cinema captured international imagination with 2002’s City of God, a stylized juxtaposition of the violence, vivacity, and poverty of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in bildungsroman form. Depicting events at a thirty year remove, City of God’s hopeful resolution stood in contrast to other less marketable explorations of similar topics by Brazilian directors, most notably the bleaker but more insightful Pixote (1980), a film which in turn inspired Mira Nair’s celebrated look at Mumbai’s street children in Salaam Bombay! (1988). In a similar vein, José Padilha’s documentary Bus 174, released the same year as City of God, functions as social commentary by excavating an inexplicable act of violence and tracing its antecedent history. It centers on a broad daylight bus hijacking by a young man named Sandro, who grew up homeless moving between jail and Rio’s slums. Taking passengers hostage and waving a gun at the congregating gawkers, assembling television cameras, and gathering police, Sandro appears to have no substantive demands as the bus sits idle in a middle-class Rio neighborhood and the afternoon unspools.
In some ways, the pointlessness of Sandro’s action serves to underline the necessity of broader examination. Was he on drugs? Was he having a psychotic break? Was he reaching out for the attention so long denied him? It will forever be impossible to know. Yet if the film cannot exculpate its central character—for this would require more than the bare archive of his life can support—it seeks to contextualize him, exploring his early life, his socialization, and his relationship to the 1993 murder of six street children by Rio police known as the Candelaria Massacre. Throughout, Padilha starkly contrasts the invisibility of the impoverished and marginal with the spectacle violence creates, momentarily capable of eliciting society’s gaze. The film pushes its viewers to think beyond headlines, charting the ways trajectories and possibilities are circumscribed. For, as the final scenes of the film demonstrate, it is only when the cameras are out of sight and the crowd has dispersed that the true horror culminates.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Héctor Babenco — Pixote (1980)
José Padilha — Elite Squad (2007)