Welcome to the City of God
Watching City of God (Fernando Meirelles & Katia Lund, 2002) this week, from the fast tempo montage of the opening scene I immediately got a sense of the hustle bustle cooking pot setting the scene where the story unfolds, as well as providing a little metaphor for the story itself. The film follows the dog eat dog world of the drug trafficking gangs of the ghettos surrounding Rio De Janeiro from the perspective of Rocket, who seeing the violence of the gangs his brother’s involved with takes another path, interested in cameras he sees photojournalism as his ticket out of the dangerous and poverty stricken life of the ghetto.
Quick flashes of a blade on a grinding stone, straight away signal danger, cut to shots of chickens tied up ready for the slaughter and then to snapshots of life in the City of God. Though the action seems simultaneous the correlation of these images is metaphoric, in my mind it says that these people live and die trapped in the ghetto like livestock. A quick drink, high tempo music, and the fast shuffling of dancing feet provide the rhythm of this bustling world where I’d imagine, work or play, the beating heart of the ghetto never stops and throughout the story there isn’t a quiet moment, City of God is the constantly bubbling cooking pot that one can’t easily escape. One of the chickens though seeing the fate of the others manages to get loose and immediately the hoodlums are after it with their guns drawn, ready to riddle it with bullets, they’d prefer to ruin the meal then let it get free.
In the end the chicken is spared by a miracle when the police pull up blocking the hoods chase with Rocket caught in between the two worlds, the chicken that represents Rocket’s freedom escapes. This focus on mise-en-scène in the opening sequence sets us up perfectly for the rest of the film, it’s a cold hard world where the beat doesn’t stop and you’ve got to be sharp if you want to survive.
