There you have it. You wait six years for a successor to the excellent City of God and two come along at once. While Elite Squad provides a brutal external insight into life inside of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, City of Men seeks to portray a more intimate aspect of it.
Indeed, this film is from the producers of City of God and is based on a television spin-off from the original film. It is a coming-of-age drama about two young men as they are about to turn eighteen. Steadfast friends since childhood, Acerola (Douglas Silva) is taking quite reluctantly to his role as a father, whilst Laranjinha (Darlan Cunha) is suddenly acutely feeling the absence of his unknown father from his life. At the same time, a festering internal gang feud on their hill will not allow the two young men to concentrate solely on these problems and it will not be long before they find themselves running for their lives, as a winner-takes-all street battle breaks out.
The world inhabited by the two characters is one of daily violence where it is not easy to keep one’s head down and avoid the sordidness of what is going on. It is with no small irony that the police only arrive on the hill at the end of the film as they look to go up through the favela in broad daylight. By then, all of the harm and damage have taken place. This shows that to survive, one must rely on one’s wits and maintain a healthy respect for where the balance of power lies.
At the same time, Fate deals a few heavy hands in this film and no amount of low profile can save either character from the chaos and bloodshed that is to follow. Unfortunately, this requires an excessive reliance on coincidence and contrivance in the film in order to advance the story. As a result, while the film does move along quickly enough to stay entertaining, it does have a soap opera feel to it at times.
The other thing that got my untethered goat was the decision to rename certain characters in the sub-titles to the likes of Clayton and Wallace. While there is undeniably a sense of The Wire to this film, bringing names from the mean streets of Baltimore into the favelas of Rio de Janeiro was frankly ridiculous and, truth be told, insulting to the audience.
In short, City of Men is not a bad film, it is just not a great one. Its strengths lie in the vivid picture it paints of life inside Rio’s shanty towns, as well as how challenging it is to maintain basic human decency in an enviornment where so many young men do not live to outsee their adolescence. As the title suggests, there comes a time, though, when manhood beckons and this is the challenge set of the characters here.
A worthwhile film to go see, in all, just do not expect to be enthralled.
Filed under: Cinema, Films, Movies | Tagged: Cidade dos Homens, City of Men, Darlan Cunha, Douglas Silva, Paulo Morelli
