City of God

dir.: Fernando Meirelles

R, 130 min.

Opening Friday at Green Hills

In the tone-setting opening of City of God, one chicken stands near another in a market stall. Chicken number two gets chopped, plucked and stuck on a skewer before the other chicken’s wide eyes. Chicken number one says screw this. The clucker makes a break for it, chased pell-mell through an alley by a throng of street kids. He reaches a clearing and stops to consider his good fortune. That’s when a truck bears down on him.

Shot, devoured or flattened—those are the Darwinian choices facing the youth of the Cidade de Deus, the notorious Rio de Janeiro slum designed to keep the city’s unsightly poor far from its tourist trade. Yet it’s the glamorous Rio of Carnaval and Black Orpheus that’s pointedly missing from City of God, an epic Brazilian crime drama that mixes nonprofessional actors and kinetic commercial filmmaking to dazzling effect.

In technique and narrative-flipping dynamism—imagine Pulp Fiction and Boogie Nights cooked into a celluloid speedball—Fernando Meirelles’ feature is a kissing cousin to American neo-gangster movies. It’s a study of three decades of life in the Cidade de Deus, as seen by a kid named Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues) who’s pulled between the temptations of thug life and the desire to avoid the early death that almost certainly entails. He watches as preteen hustlers like the babyface killer Li’l Dice (Douglas Silva) graduate from sticking up no-tell motels in the late 1960s to waging bloody drug wars in the early 1980s.

The movie’s dwindling cast was picked from Rio’s present-day favelas, and characters and incidents were workshopped for eight months before filming by Meirelles, a top Brazilian commercial director, and co-director Kátia Lund, who had experience in the Cidade de Deus. Characters were based on real figures; even so, the actors play them as recognizable types: the good-kid observer, the mad-dog psycho, the likable lieutenant who’s doomed the minute he mentions going straight. Just like the celebrity-conscious outlaws they’re playing, the untrained actors (many of whom grew up seeing real gangsters) seem to base their behavior in part on movies.

Predictably, the blatant Western influence has roused the ire of American culture cops, who judge foreign movies against some imagined benchmark of ethnic purity. But the pervasiveness of such influences only speaks to the gangster picture’s cross-cultural appeal. In his 1948 essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Robert Warshow praised the gangster movie for defying the institutional optimism that glosses over public ills. “The experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans,” he wrote, identifying the screen gangster as a real-world criminal inflated by imagination and legend into a mythic audience surrogate.

Had Warshow lived to see Meirelles’ gun-toting tots—or John Woo’s iconic yakuza, or Jean-Pierre Melville’s stylish hit men—he’d have dropped that closing “to Americans.” In its fascinating glimpses into the mechanics of drug production and armed robbery, City of God embodies one of Warshow’s most provocative points: that the gangster movie represents a real-life equation of business and violence in the viewer’s mind. The city is the gangster’s paradise and purgatory, and Meirelles uses Cesar Charlone’s whirling-dervish camera and a Soderbergh-like color scheme to turn Cidade de Deus’ sordid history into a repository of urban folklore.

City of God is so confident in its casual storytelling twists, so brazen in its violence and wicked humor, that it will probably strike a lot of people as suspect. Surely a movie this entertaining has to be sugarcoating the realities of poverty and street crime. Yet Robert Warshow recognized commercial appeal as part of the gangster genre’s power. In Brazil, the movie’s success has focused public attention on the state of the favelas, perhaps because of the gangster movie’s built-in accessibility. As the opening scene continues, Rocket reaches down to help the imperiled chicken, only to find himself trapped in a machine-gun showdown. As metaphors for social injustice go, it’s tough to beat a chicken running from the frying pan into fire.

In brief

Stan Brakhage, the visionary American experimental filmmaker who exemplified avant-garde cinema for five decades, died Sunday in British Columbia after a grueling bout with cancer. He was 70. Since making his first film, “Interim,” in 1952 at age 19, Brakhage produced a staggering and protean body of work that included nearly 400 films. Many of these were painstakingly crafted by hand, scratched or painted onto the celluloid itself, without the mediation of a camera. To make one of his most famous works, the four-minute 1963 film “Mothlight,” Brakhage taped bits of moths, bugs and plants between strips of clear Mylar editing tape. Light peers around and passes through the organic material—an effect less like an X-ray than a releasing of the world’s inner illumination.

As with many experimental artists, Brakhage’s influence has seeped into the mainstream through commercials and other mongrel forms, while his own films have been relatively hard to see (especially here). Maybe that will change: Some local admirers have suggested a retrospective, which would be wonderful. In the meantime, Criterion will issue By Brakhage, a two-disc DVD set of his films, in early May. A good place to start exploring Brakhage’s vast work is www.fredcamper.com, the Web site of scholar/critic Fred Camper, his friend and champion, who posts links to film resources, journal articles, even efforts to help the filmmaker’s family offset his medical expenses.

♦ If your only prior exposure to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist was its appalling early video release—shorn of a key sequence, chopped to fit the TV screen, in a bleached-out transfer with Gamera-quality dubbing—you essentially haven’t seen a movie legendary for its color and composition. Bertolucci’s visually ravishing 1970 study of corruption and conformity in fascist Italy is the showpiece of Sarratt’s spring calendar; it screens Thursday through Saturday at Vanderbilt’s student cinema.

♦ The Belcourt Theatre has announced two initiatives designed to encourage local filmmakers of all ages. Coming up first is the Hillsboro Village arthouse’s first Young Filmmakers Festival, for moviemakers 18 years or younger. Films must have been made no earlier than Jan. 1, 2002, and should be submitted on VHS tape with a $10 entry fee. The fee includes admission to the public screening April 12 at the theater; the event serves as a warm-up for the theater’s Young Filmmakers Workshop this June. Call 479-4654 for more information, or pick up an entry form in the Belcourt lobby.

More ambitious still is the start of what the Belcourt hopes will be an annual contest to find a signature trailer for the city’s last historic neighborhood theater. Not only will the winning short get its maker a $1,000 check and a public screening, it will be shown before all films at the Belcourt for one year. For rules and other information, see www.belcourt.org or call 846-3150.