By Chaos, Freelance WriterCITY OF God is a brilliantly visceral and violent film. The violence is not stylised, but raw and at times even touching, and quite often somewhat scary. Watching the movie at times seemed like looking into a mirror and seeing the seamier side of Jamaica staring back at you.
The movie was shown last Thursday at Grosvenor Galleries, Grosvenor Terrace, St. Andrew, in conjunction with Afflicted Yard. It tells the tale of a self-perpetuating circle of violence in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 'the City of God'.
ROCKET'S TALE
The movie is told from the perspective of 'Rocket', a child of the slum who wanted to become a professional photographer and to lose his virginity, not necessarily in that order. As he grows up, he sees his fellow slum dwellers, including his own brother, drop like flies in the seamy world of drugs and guns. This goes on a while until order of a sort is established by Lil Dice, who becomes Lil Ze, and is violence and cruelty personified. He ruthlessly takes over the drug trade in the City of God, leaving all but one of his enemies and potential rivals dead. Yet he grows ever greedier and more unstable. The house of cards begins to fall down when he rapes and commits multiple murders, which leads to an all out war.
Rocket sees all this and tells us about it, including his own abortive attempt at crime when he realises that trying to earn an honest living is an exercise in futility.
UNCANNY PARALLELS
What is truly disturbing about City of God are the disturbing parallels one cannot but draw between the 'fictional' Rio and present-day Jamaica. Police corruption, the don, the gunmen, called 'hoods' in the movie, the drugs and the demonstration of how economic and societal ills sometimes seem to allow for no other choice but a descent into a life of crime. "You must study," Rocket's elder brother tells him. "I'm a hood because I have no brain," he goes on to say, before exiting stage left after a touch of adultery, the aftermath of which saw a woman being buried alive.
WAR AND DEATH
Of course, there are also the wars, with people dying left, right and centre, and as one character put it, most of them innocents. City of God is told largely in flashback, the story of each individual strand being shown and how they intertwine to become a story of love and hate, drugs and death. Based on a true story, to say the movie is fascinating would be putting it mildly.
There are some contradictions which help make the characterisations that much easier to relate to. For example, after having committed a robbery and before running off to hide, a trio of young 'hoods' say to each other "In God we trust," the irony of the situation seemingly escaping them. One other thing the movie does, it points out the seemingly impossible task of breaking the cycle of crime and violence, since at the end, a bunch of kids no older than 12 have stepped into the void left by the warring factions and it is business as usual.
A little scary, since one gets the impression that the very same could and does happen here. City of God is well worth the gut-wrenching watch.
Afflicted and Grosvenor Galleries will be combining to show a movie every two weeks, movies that promise to be off the beaten path.
