Introduction: Brazilians often say that "God spent six days creating the world, and the seventh day was spent creating Rio de Janeiro." ”
The slums of Rio de Janeiro began to emerge at the end of the 19th century, when Brazil was faltering out of its semi-feudal past, and now it has become the second largest city in Brazil. This tall urban complex is home to more than 700 slums, and the huge gap between rich and poor and management has made it a breeding ground for all kinds of crime, and slums have become another business card here.
As Brazil's international metropolis, problems such as drugs, violence, and the sex trade have emerged endlessly and have not been fundamentally solved. In this local slum, the regional power is mostly in the hands of gangs, creating a unique and complex social situation in Rio de Janeiro.
The movie "City of God" shows us one of the slums located in Rio de Janeiro, which is full of representatives, poverty, killing, dirty, disorder, called a place where even God can sigh when he sees it. Released in 2002 under the direction of Fernando, the film tells the story of gang wars in the city of God from the perspective of a boy named Ah Gun, who is not the protagonist of the film but has to be involved in this story.
The film's expressive approach is gorgeous but not chaotic, the fast pace and abundant audiovisual expression strongly provoke the audience's nerves, the film style has the aesthetic characteristics of postmodernism, and the reality is fully expressed under this representation, as the director said, "It doesn't matter what I want, all I have to do is let reality emerge naturally." ”
The film is adapted from the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, "City of God", the story spans 30 years, through the eyes of the boy Ah Cannon to tell people about the growth experience and life direction of a group of people. The characters in the film are interconnected and mutually inherited, the film uses flashbacks to open the scene, uses the flashback of the lens to unfold the narrative of several characters in the story, and after the narrative that beats between the characters, the film finally falls back to the opening picture, forming a circular system in the narrative structure.
Through the narrative of the text, we see a realistic theme that the film explores and reveals—how sin is bred and cultivated in the soil of the city of God. The film discusses the main causes of the harsh social environment in South America, the corruption and inaction of governments. Adolescents are born in an environment of poverty and disorder, and due to the lack of education and the help of quality of life, their outlook on life and values has been seriously deviated and distorted.
Maybe they once had their own life pursuits, but in a helpless environment, they were forced to survive and gradually became the same kind, just like Knockout Ned in the film, and people like Ah Gun who can finally choose their ideal career are few and lucky. Such a social environment has a huge impact on children in the early stages of their development.
For example, the Three Heroes of the Youth play an inseparable role in Xiao Douzi's path to the drug lord. In the absence of a sound personality, they are confused by the honor, respect, and material enjoyment of crime, and thus continue to pick up a gun and become the next offender, forming a never-ending vicious cycle, so the film also uses this formal reincarnation to echo the real-world problems it refers to.
The film is born from the literary work of the same name, and the translation of the text to the image is undoubtedly successful, the film uses a very stylish film language to show the social picture of the slums and the "people" in the slums, in order to enhance the credibility of the film, the director has adopted a variety of ways to shape this authenticity.
The most impactful thing in the film is the gangs and even the entire slum people's disregard for the value of life, the film is full of many scenes of death in the narrative, and when dealing with these scenes, the director turns it into a kind of daily emergency, even the death of the main characters does not do too much emotional rendering, such as the use of strong directivity and other elements such as music. In order to be close to the truth, the director specially invited the real actors from the slums when selecting the roles, and listened to some experiences from personal experience to make the film more real and natural in performance and plot performance.
"City of God" shows us a Darwinian society in which the law fails and even collusion between officials and bandits makes the lives of commoners need to be balanced by gang constraints, and when this balance is broken, the result may be the collapse of old power and the beginning of new power. There is no belief in human nature here, and anyone who tries to escape will eventually die because of his own selfish desires to betray you or even kill you.
Benny's death shows us the despair of the City of God, a circle that cannot be escaped and cannot be saved by civilization. Interestingly, the group of children who killed the beans with a gun at the end of the film actually grew up to become one of the notorious local gang forces when they became adults, and the film did not show them the darkness of the crime, but instead made them more obsessed with guns and crime.
Brazilians say that God created Rio on the seventh day, and he gave it together with beauty and darkness, becoming a miniature human social landscape in which fate and cycles continue forever and helplessly like experiments in a transparent box.