Reviews

'What are you doing, you're just a kid?' "I steal, I kill, I carry a gun, how can I be just a kid? I am a man."

Many who visit Brazil the first time, tend to view Brazilians as lacking serious ambition. They seem to party the night away, and appear to seldom work. The old joke about Brazilians is that they have breakfast at 2:00 in the afternoon.

But such a narrow view does not take into account the fact that while we in America work to live, sweating away for pennies which the government steals at every turn, they in Brazil Live to Live. It is a different kind of living, a life that sambas with the vibrance of the swaying palm and the bounding drum. A life that understands that we are only on this earth for a cup of cafezinho, and we should have fun while we can before the end comes, but quick.

But as the City of God also shows us, Brazilian life is often nasty, brutish and short. A certain degree of anarchy overshadows all the denizens of the film. But Director Fernando Meirelles takes a situation lacking definite boundaries and clear authority, and creates a framework, a structure, that of Gang Rule. The gang-members are not seasoned, old-time criminals like Fredo Corleone or even Tony Montana. Instead, they are a bunch of sweet-faced kids. No one is older than 25, partly because of choice, but mainly because no one lives past this age.

On the surface, in this context, City of God is a coming of age story of two young people, a sort of Brazilian "Angels With Dirty Faces.' One character escapes from the City of God, while the other succumbs to it.

But when one scratches beneath, one finds the film a comment on the morally bankrupt City of God in Rio De Janeiro, and a mirror on Brazil itself. Far away from the party hopping, Travel and Leisure postcard perfect white beaches, is another world, one of marauding bands of displaced children.

The most surprising thing about City of God is its references to American films. Most Brazilian films, as the films of all countries do, owe allegiance to their own particular cultural situation. Brazil owes a cultural debt to Europe (Portugal, Germany, Italy) and Africa. However, the United States has a far more distant cultural relationship to Brazil. That is where City of God triumphs to me an American film goer. It uses the chapter format made famous in Pulp Fiction and more recently, Kill Bill. It uses the familial structure present in Goodfellas. It uses the 'white-suit cool' present in Miami Vice and the Bacardi and cola ads from the preview before this very movie.

The fact that City of God can be subtitled Grand Theft Auto: Sao Paolo, is not a surprise nor a mistake. The film is built like a video game in its use of random acts of violence. But the fluid perfect camera work and editing give way to a film with enormous contradictions. Contradictions as large and as vast as the noble country itself.

Stylistically, the camera work does not conform to its premise as a gangster film. A gangster film never looked this good. It is as if the camera is released in the wide open beaches, and kicked around like one of Ronaldinho's headers. It starts on the sand and moves steadily across. It picks up on the story but then heads into the sun. It then leaves us, the film-viewer, with the most indelible image in years as we see Sonia Braga (A world icon and sex symbol of Brazil)'s niece, sitting on the sun-drenched coast putting her arm around another young boy. The innocence conveyed in this scene is something to behold. It literally takes your breath away.

You see the slamming of different, competing themes. You see the subtlety and tranquility of the beach, smashed into scenes of battered youths dying on city streets. You see a wealth of hypnotic ambiguous images pulled together, much like the very Culture of Brazil itself.

Before you watch Mullholland Dr, stop and think that David Lynch was 57 years old when he made this, his best film, an age where most film-makers best films are far behind them. While film-makers of similar ages like Spielberg and Scorsese become more and more inconsequential with each new film they produce, Lynch keeps getting stronger. Every great director needs a self-reflexive film, a film that depicts the art and artistry of the cinema itself. Fellini made 8 1/2, Truffaut, Day For Night, and Altman, the Player. Now David Lynch has made a great film about Hollywood and also a poignant love story. Mulholland Dr. does what lesser films like Bound could not. It realistically depicts a sensitive relationship between two women, avoiding some frat-boy fantasy. The film is forerun two quite influential films, Ingmar Bergman's Persona, in which a pair of women's personalities merge, and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, in its depiction of a mysterious blonde woman who may not be who she seems to be. In fact, two shots from the film are exact duplicates from these earlier films. Early in the film, the two women's faces merge into one shot. Similarly, a shot lifted directly from Vertigo has the Blonde protagonist (?) looking down over a balcony. You never feel at ease when you are watching Mulholland Dr. The pacing, and cutting do not match, the lines of the story come and go seemingly at a whim. The electronic score, as composed by Angelo Bandalamenti, adds to this unease. It wavers and shimmies. That shiver down your spine is no illusion. This film is truly scary, but in a good way. You feel like, `what's going on here? But you like it.'

David Lynch is Alfred Hitchcock unbound. If nothing else, Mulholland Dr. teaches us that Hitch was probably born in the wrong era. Creating most of his great films in the 50's and the 60's, an undercurrent of violence and sexuality always ran under Hitch's films, seen most directly in Psycho. Many have said that hinting at violence and sexuality rather than showing it onscreen made Hitch's films more suspenseful. But one could only imagine what would happen, had Hitch been given the freedom an R rating to work with. But, alas, the public was probably not ready for him yet. His first and only R-rated film, Frenzy, exhibited some of his repressed sexuality, depicting scenes of violence and rape. But by then, it was too late. Hitchcock was in his early 80's and it was clear his time had passed.

Enter Neo-Hitchcockian David Lynch, who in Mulholland Dr. charges a modern day love story with uninhibited sexuality. Lynch has the precision and sensibility of Hitchcock, but in a more enlightened age, he is allowed free reign to pursue his unique vision.