In 2002, Fernando Meirelles gave the world the Golden Globe and Academy Award-nominated City of God. His was not the Rio de Janeiro they sell to tourists at travel agencies. It was a poverty-stricken shantytown infested with gangs and shattered by urban warfare. Now, six years later, director Paulo Morelli has created a companion piece in City of Men, not a sequel so much as an alternate snapshot of streets we’ve seen before.
Wallace (Darlan Cunha) and Acerola (Douglas Silva) are lifelong friends as close as brothers. Days away from their 18th birthdays, the teenagers are confronting responsibilities and challenges no adult, let alone any child, should have to face. While Wallace sets out to find the father he’s never known, Ace struggles with his new marriage and the tiny son that comes with it.
As the two boys attempt to navigate the tumultuous maze of adulthood, Rio’s endless culture of violence closes in around them. Soon, both are caught in the crossfire of a war between regional gangs composed of small armies of child soldiers. As Ace is forced into choosing sides just to survive, he and Wallace confront a shocking secret from their shared past with the power to drive them apart. Ultimately, Wallace must decide if he is willing to go into hell to rescue his friend, even if that friend is helping to stoke the fire.
While the plot of City of Men is far too convenient from time to time, the authenticity of the actors to the situations in which they find themselves goes a long way to make up for it. After the success of City of God, Brazilian television produced a television series with the name City of Men, profiling the lives of Wallace and Ace as they aged from just 13-years-old into the men seen in the new film by the same name. Footage from that television series has been incorporated into the movie in the form of flashbacks. Seeing the same adult actors from the film together as much younger children imbues this film with a degree of hyperrealism unmatched by any other movie.
Rarely will you see a film with the power to so convincingly model a world in which violence begets violence, the sins of fathers are visited on their sons, and those who live by the gun perish by the gun. Shot in the same rough, gritty, handheld style as its predecessor, City of Men is a nerve-racking, strangely beautiful story that balances ambiguity in one hand and hope in the other.
Is it possible for Wallace and Ace to escape the violence that has consumed everyone around them and break the cycle for their families once and for all, or are they doomed to disappear into the same abyss which has swallowed everyone they know and love? Perhaps, we’ll need to visit these streets again in a few years to find out.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
