Pixote, la loi du plus faible

Perhaps the most brutal filmic portrait of youth ever made; Charles Dickens meets Hieronymous Bosch in this tale of a group of boys struggling to survive in the reformatories and mean streets of Brazil as the cycle of prey transformed into predators is documented.

The saddest detail is to realize that this film, made almost twenty five years ago, documents a world that in terms of its poverty and depravity, has apparently changed very little. A brutal reality captured here but with some of the most layered acting I've ever seen in the history of film by a group of amateurs picked from the streets of Sao Paulo with no previous experience. Not one or two good performances, the entire cast is quite simply remarkable, and even sadder is the fact that most of them have probably now been swallowed by the street life they portrayed.

Not as sophisticated a vision as Bunuel's 'Los Olvidados' or as sensational as Clarke's 'Kids,' but in this genre of 'children growing up in the streets' it is easily the most emotionally powerful film of them all.

"Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco" deals with what is perhaps the greatest of all Brazilian themes: poverty. And along with poverty the other unnatural feelings and actions it brings; prostitution, violence, crime, rape and murder.

Brazil is the country of paradoxes, and its social problems are present everywhere. The difference between the rich and the poor; the beautiful and the ugly; happiness and the most profound human decay.

"Pixote" is one of the films that dare to touch and open these so painful wounds, and does it without the slightest glimmer of hope, in an honest portrayal of a country that, like Pixote himself, is already lost.

"Pixote" is the one of most powerful, shocking, and moving motion picture to come from Brazil. It's about the lives of street kids on the streets of Sao Paulo and Rio De Janeiro, and it centers around a ten-year-old boy. The camera follows them around in an almost documentary style;from the juvenile detention center (where most of the staff is as corrupt as the police) and back to the streets, and it never turns away from the horrors of the city. Prostitution, drug use/dealing, corruption, and murder are all witnessed by these youths; yet it's something they're painfully used to. Director Hector Babenco used real street kids as the actors, adding to the films brutal reality. Although not for everyone, a film I highly recommend. An emotionally devastating movie.

This is no walk in the park. I saw this when it came out, and haven't had the guts to watch it again. You will never see a more horrifyingly devastating or depressing movie. I felt like I'd been severely beaten. What kind of world are we living in when we have children who are treated worse than garbage? This is our world, what we have created, what we have allowed to happen. And I would hesitate to say that I-ME-WE are not responsible for this. Babenco made this film to wake us up, to shake us to our very core, and he succeeded. How can we be cruel, or self-indulgent, or neglectful of our children, when we see the graphic results of such behavior? He is pointing a finger of accusation at us all for doing this to the lowliest and least powerful of our society. And if you aren't doing something each day to prevent it, then you are part of the problem. I am NOT a religious fanatic, but this movie made me think about the state of my soul.

When one thinks of the Brazilian cinema it is this film Pixote which comes to mind. Hector Babenco gives us one uncompromising and brutal look at the lives of the street boys in Brazil's largest city Sao Paulo. One only hopes that it is 35 years since Pixote was released and the hope is things have improved for these kids who have to grow up way before their time.

The films centers on the title character played by a young actor who himself never made it out of the slums. Babenco used real street kid Fernando Ramos DaSilva as the ten year old Pixote who was killed at the age of 19 in a homicide that still raises questions. One thing this film does show is that Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence didn't make it to Brazil, especially for the young.

We see things in Pixote that you would never see in American cinema portrayed even now. Rape in a juvenile detention center is the established norm here, especially when it involves Jorge Juliao, a young cross dressing street kid. When the slightly older Gilberto Moura uses sex to assert authority over Juliao it's both frightening and touching. Poor Juliao has one rotten opinion of his own self worth from his experience. One gets the impression that home wasn't all that much better. But these things were being shown way before America even knew there were transgender issues. Juliao even more than DaSilva is who you remember from Pixote.

35 years later Pixote is a powerful and disturbing film.