Film - Think

The City of God is full of contradictions that manage to pass themselves off as simple juxtapositions. This is not meant as a slight on the film as perhaps it is only by such scandalous mechanics that the true terror of poverty attains representation. The origins of this community (the “City of God” is a soiled complex of slums designed to keep the poor from the center of Rio and its tourist populations) is shaded in sepia tones, rendered in a quaint, folksy hue. In contrast, we see the same complex years later having been upgraded from an orderly collection of small homes on dirt streets to a full-fledged concrete jungle. These same streets are now shot in sharp, crisp colors, mire and grime in high-definition and flashy jump-cuts. Like an action film shot in a slum. The juxtaposition here, between a romanticized past and a hyper-realist present, just begins to toe the line of fraudulent contradiction before the film falls apart. It concludes with the very same cycles at work in the beginning of the film, the apparent difference between past and present made by the different visual periods of the film film sadly collapses in the final scene. There are a number of other dichotomies that present themselves the same way, the beach and the city, the City of God and the countryside, the police and the reporters. Each of these sets of imagery are pushed as far as possible, just to the point of caricature, before being realized as genuine conflicts rather than simply narrative games or screenwriting flare.

This issue of representation comes to a hilt in the very end of the film. We follow Rocket, long-term resident of the City of God, from childhood to young adulthood as he unwittingly lands a job as newspaper photographer and becomes a chronicler of this beastly underworld of which Rio isn’t even aware. In this final scene, armed only with camera, Rocket becomes witness to a grand street battle that takes down one of the City of God’s most ruthless empires. Well hidden, Rocket can only watch as this gang’s boss meets an ironic demise, stripped of whatever brand of dignity he had forged for himself. Rocket is there as a public witness, a witness from outside this awful cycle, but only from a distance. Reportage in this case becomes caricatured as impotent, distant, and only present by chance, perhaps an act as pointless as the deaths of all these children it is there to witness. The polarity in this last scene, between Rocket as a reporter and this gang boss as his dead subject toes the line of contradiction in the sense that both have done something futile. The cycle hasn’t been broken. This same sense of contradiction is evoked by the title, City of God. As a place name, it is as false as it isn’t. Where else would God be than such a place? A place ripe with such awful juxtapositions.