La cité des hommes

"City of Men" is a companion piece to Fernando Meirelles' 2002 film "City of God," but it's a much different animal from the earlier film. Both are set in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, and both are about young men fashioning lives for themselves out of the only resources available to them. But whereas "City of God" was kinetic, angry and immediate, "City of Men" is more reflective and conventional, and it comes to a much more hopeful conclusion than the earlier film.

"City of Men" is by far the weaker of the two. The carefully crafted screenplay was full of the heavy themes and plot twists of a Shakesperean tragedy, but I found myself missing the unscripted, documentary-like feel of Meirelles' film. "City of Men" is about the absence of fathers, and about two friends who find themselves fighting on opposite sides because of deeds committed by their own dads -- sons literally inheriting the sins of their fathers. But the script is too often heavy handed, and the director, Paulo Morelli, chooses to communicate too much about the lives of these people through blunt exposition. We don't learn about them from what the actors playing them do or how they act, but rather through the lines they read, and we're almost always aware that they're reading lines.

Nevertheless, the acting is strong enough that I found myself caring for the two leads and fairly engrossed in how their stories turned out. Morelli isn't as accomplished a director as Meirelles, but the film is still well directed on its own more modest terms. If I didn't already have "City of God" to compare it to, I might have liked it even more.

Grade: B+

This sepia-sunbleached feature derives from, and features the same main characters as, the eponymous 2002-2005 Brazilian TV series about (mostly) boys in the "favela" hill ghettos above Rio for which Morelli did some of the writing and directing. The series, starring Darlan Cunha as Laranjinha (Wallace) and Douglas Silva as Acerola (Ace) --growing up from year to year and episode to episode--sort of grew out of the Fernando Meirelles/Kátia Lund film, 'City of God,' which in turn was based on Paulo Lins' tumultuous and partly autobiographical novel about three decades in the slums and the involvement of youth as dealers, assassins, and victims. Actually the Ace/Wallace characters as young teenagers, always played by Silva and Cunha, predate 'City of God' by two years; they appeared in a short film called 'Palace II' in 2000. The history of these films and stories is as intricate as the world they depict. Douglas Silva was the prepubescent tough in 'City of God' known by he moniker Dadinho--Lil' Dice.

'City of Men' is warmer and more intimate than the original film. 'City of God' has been both admired for its virtuosity--it's full of tours de force of visual violence and equally brilliant feats of rapid storytelling--and condemned as reveling too much in blood and gore, making teenage killers who terrorize neighborhoods into little glamor boys. That's quite true. It's unfortunately also true that in the ghettos of Rio as of other places such as the USA, young gun-toting drug dealers are the sexy local pop stars. Maybe the earlier film fails to take a sufficiently clear moral stand, or too much reflects the viewpoints of the young favela males it depicts. Nonetheless it's exhilarating film-making. Paradoxically, it also has a more positive arc than 'City of Men,' because its hero works his way out of the slums and into mainstream Rio de Janeiro to become a photojournalist. In 'City of Men,' nothing like that happens. Instead, there is a difficult reconciliation between the two boys, on the brink of eighteen, despite a stunning revelation about their lost fathers, and one of the fathers comes back into the picture and, reluctantly at first, chooses to be a warm presence in the life of his son. Both of the boys endure moments of terrible loneliness and isolation, which reveal how isolating the world of shifting and dangerous loyalties and hills fought for and lost is for a boy who in the first place lacks parents. But the focus is on the reconciliations.

In the TV series, the boys are in school. They face difficulties even showing up, and only one of them, Ace (Silva) really hits the books (he's also fascinated by guns of all kinds). Laranjinha is closer to turning into a young hood.

Thugh the new movie 'City of Men' is less specific than the TV series (judging by the DVD collections of episodes that I've seen) and suffers a bit by comparison with either it or 'City of God,' the vibrancy of the life on offer in all these films is still unmistakable, as well as the attractiveness of the young actors, the warmth of the world evoked--and vernacular swiftness that of the filming and editing, which somehow is both relaxing and unnerving.

Wallace/Laranjinha is trying to find out who his real father is; he doesn't want "unknown" to be on the place for "father" on his papers. Acerola knows his father is dead, and he wants to know what happened. He's faced with the local problem from the other side. His wife Cris (Camila Monteiro) keeps leaving their toddler son Clayton (Vinicius Oliveira) with him to take care of. He doesn't want to accept the responsibility. But if he reneges on it, he'll leave Clayton in the same place he and Wallace are in. Ace abandons Clayton on the beach early on when Madrugadão (Midnight, Jonathan Haagensen), the gang leader of the hill where they live, risks assassination to descend on a super-hot day for a swim in the ocean. He also turns some flashy cartwheels and shows off his spectacular pecs. Madrugadão, like Wallace (i.e. Darlan Cunha), is handsome and charismatic. Ace is so childish he forgets his own son; but he rushes back and finds him. And when Cris gets a job in the wealthier city of São Paulo, Ace, with great difficulty, forces himself to take on the responsibility of raising Clayton.

Wallace (perhaps a bit too easily) finds his father, a bearded man named Heraldo (Rodrigo dos Santos), who has just gotten out of prison after serving fifteen years of a twenty-year sentence--for murder. Heraldo's beard cannot conceal the fact that he is not very mature. He hasn't shouldered the responsibilities of being a man. But he also carries the weight of suffering and gratitude.

When rival gang leader Fasto (Eduardo "BR" Piranha) takes over Midnight's territory on Dead End Hill, a new gang war breaks out right in the middle of Ace and Wallace's journey of self-discovery.

'City of Men' is a more tender, individual and grownup story than 'City of God'; from what I've seen of the TV series it grows out of, it's less specific and less witty. It works as a kind of antidote to the amorality one feels in 'City of God,' and its warmth is touching. Nor is it visually ineffective, or its sense of the milieu less rich--except. Except that it quite lacks the momentum and adrenaline-rush brilliance of 'City of God's' virtuoso film-making and editing, or the rich range of minor characters the latter has. It is a little bit meandering, and its fast jump-cut slides from scene to scene sometimes seem out of place. As the AV Club reviewer says, much has been gained in this new film, but much has been lost as well. Still 'City of Men' is well worth watching.

Director Fernando Meirelles' Brazilian gang warfare epic "City of God" made its mark in cinematic history as the premier film on depicting the horrors of drug trafficking & gang violence in Rio, Brazil's favelas. So why not a "city pass" on a sequel? A few years after the "City of God" fame, Meirelles and other collaborators including Director Paulo Morelli decided to produce a Brazilian TV episodic series entitled "City of Men" on the same premise. They casted young Brazilian actors Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha as two charismatic best friends living their lives in spite of all the gang warfare that surrounds them in Rio's favelas. The series was a success, and the time to hit the silver screen came calling to the story of "City of Men". Even though "City of Men" does not involve the same characters of "City of God", it still does incorporate the same themes of it predecessor including: friendship, loyalty, drugs, poverty, violence, and survival. However, the overlying theme of "City of God" was drug trafficking with all the aforementioned as background themes. While the forefront of "City of Men" is the young protagonists' quest to find their unknown fathers with all the aforementioned also incorporated as background themes. "City of Men" does not excel in masterful storytelling and character development as "City of God" but it does hit the mark on the survival fortitude of its main protagonists. Meirelles only served as producer this time around and wisely transplanted the talents of Director Morelli and stars Silva & Cunha to the big screen adaptation. All of them hit the mark with their efforts. Even though many of the themes are terrifying and at sporadic times disturbing to look at, "City of Men" continues to keep it rio on the realities of a drug & gang induced life in Rio's favelas. **** Good

Following the cult Brazilian TV series "City of Men" (2002-2005), Acerola (Douglas Silva) and Laranjinha (Darlan Cunha), two orphaned, teenage street kids living in Morro da Sinuca (one of Rio's 800+ favelas), are now about to turn eighteen and face the issues of adulthood. Fatherhood -- in a social milieu where most kids grow up fatherless -- is the key theme here: Acerola is now a teen dad who has to take care of his baby boy when his teen wife moves to São Paulo to work as a babysitter; and Laranjinha is on the search of the identity of his unknown father, only to discover he's alive and is an ex-convict on parole. On the background, the violent, destitute, lawless, drug-gang controlled life in Rio's favelas.

A sort of mix of Fernando Meirelles' (co-producer here) "City of God" in visual style and "Oliver Twist" in spirit, one of the major problems of "City of Men" is its contrived plot solutions: we have to deal with Acerola's impossibly fast finding of Laranjinha's father whereabouts. And Acerola's grandmother ending up homeless and abandoned by her family (in the film's phoniest solution). And trafficker Nefasto suddenly changing sides in the gang war; and Acerola's one-chance-in-a-million spotting trafficker Fiel still alive, and the phony solution linking Acerola's and Laranjinha's fathers in the past, etc.

Director Paulo Morelli -- who made the practically unseen "Preço da Paz" and the insipid "Viva Voz", and directed some episodes of the "City of Men" TV series -- comes from the publicity world, and it certainly shows. His images are (too) soigné: the black bodies have a golden shine, with pearly sweat drops and blazingly white teeth. He adopts cinéma-vérité style (in the camera-work, dialog, performances), now de rigueur in films dealing with "stark realities". Oscar-nominated editor Daniel Rezende ("City of God", "Motorcycle Diaries") tries to keep things moving fast so we don't have time to think about plot holes and contrivances. Antonio Pinto's music is beautiful but inexplicably old-fashioned for a movie about teenagers. On a positive note, the sound design and effects are superb.

The cast -- most of them from the TV series -- is asked to do more of the same. Douglas Silva (Acerola) relies on his intuitive acting and his big, expressive fish face. Jonathan Haagensen (as drug lord Madrugadão) again acts with his pout and bare torso in his usual laid back bad-boy style, looking suitably stoned. Babu Santana does his usual scenery-chewing in a bit as a trafficker. Camila Monteiro, Luciano Vidigal (a sensitive actor with an impossible part) and others repeat their TV roles. Eduardo BR as Nefasto suggests a blooming talent; Rodrigo dos Santos as Laranjinha's father has a great movie face, and first-timers Pedro Henrique (Caju) and Naíma Silva (Camila) are sensitively directed. The best is Darlan Cunha as Laranjinha: no-nonsense, nonplussed, witty and resourceful, his deadpan acting is the essence of the "carioca cool".

But there's something bothersome about "Cidade dos Homens": it's hard to concentrate on Acerola's sex troubles or Laranjinha's unlikely instant attachment to his shady father (are Rio's street kids really this naive?) when characters like Caju (the dim-witted, glamor-seeking teenager who joins the drug gang) or those really original characters -- the teenage girls that have "upgraded" from "gangsta molls" to becoming gangstas themselves -- screamed for attention and development. The fact is it's weird to take "City of Men" for its face value, i.e. a buddy-buddy movie with the favela drug war on the background, though we all know ordinary life somehow always goes on even in the most violent, crude realities.

By focusing on the personal problems of Acerola and Laranjinha, director Morelli and writer Elena Soárez ("House of Sand", "Eu Tu Eles", lending a sensitive touch to what could have been a stolid buddy movie) choose to concentrate on plot and characters, using a lot of big close-ups of the kids' faces so we won't be distracted by the hellish favela background -- and yet the "background" jumps right on our laps. Poverty, segregation, racism, drugs, guns and violence, the absence of schools, hospitals, formal employment or government assistance, the dire conditions of life in the favelas that affect over one million people in Rio are, in fact, the cause of most of Acerola and Laranjinha's "personal" problems. Maybe one day we'll all be desensitized enough to take that sort of background as routine scenery, but not right yet.

"City of Men" has a major asset, anyhow: the final scene is lyrical, ingenious and filled with humor -- it's a great finale for the successful series that dared put on Brazilian TV favela teenagers as protagonists, teenagers who usually just show up in movies and TV (and, many times, and tragically, in real life) as traffickers, junkies, thieves or corpses.

The film City of Men is a fantastic Brazilian film. It's directed by the same creator of City of God and the City of Men TV series. Now, personally, I recommend you watch the TV series before watching the movie due to many flashbacks throughout the film. The TV series also adds more depth to the characters that add to the overall enjoyment of the film. The film is still set in the favelas in Rio, but instead of focusing on the gangs as in City of God, it focuses on two 18 year old boys. The film is similar to City of God, but with a more light-hearted feel to it. The film also has similar cinematography. Overall, I prefer City of God to this film, but it is a worthy follow up to a fantastic film. 9 stars out of 10 in relation to City of God, but as a film in general, compared to the majority of films created this would deserve 10 stars.