Brazil's "City of God"

Cinema World Tour, Film #4

Country: Brazil

Watched in: Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India

Rating: 8/10

One of the most popular foreign films of all time, holding high places in top lists of all kind of film websites, City of God is undoubtedly a good choice for Brazil.

It definitely lives up to the expectations. This is an enthralling, adrelanine-fueled work, brought to life by an ensemble of fantastic actors and the frenetic cinematography and rhythmic editing, which give you the feeling that you're a gang fight photographer yourself.

It manages perfectly to keep all it's strings together, to tell a ton of stories without losing the focus too much. City of God focuses on many characters, more than would usually be healthy for a story, but doesn't neglect one of them. Instead of making the various cross-cuts between the many character's stories tiresome, it keeps them all interesting and engaging.

The beauty of Meirelle's film is to show the violence, tragedy and hopelessness as a circle: every act of violence leads to another act of violence, which therefore leads to another one – and in the end, these acts lead back to the origin of the first act, which therefore causes a new circle of violence. There is this astonishing scene in the film, in which a young kid called Otto, which was shown to the audience once throughout the whole film, commits an act of violence. In a flashback, it is shown why this kid commits this crime, because of another act of violence which was a few seconds long, which the audience probably didn't even remember. This single scene shows perfectly how the circle closes. I don't want to say to much about it, you gonna have to see for yourself and understand what I mean.

City of God may not be a masterpiece, it misses a bit the soul, the characters are not deep enough, often rather representations of a typical ghetto's character. But especially for western audiences, which are not used to these kinds of images and situations, the film's twisted, witty plot and the many storylines, influencing each other, create altogether perfect high-quality entertainment.