City of God wants to tell you a story, and that’s all it wants to do. All behold the age when filmmakers are praised for their kinetics and “visual imagination” when they’ve lost all hope of telling us something – not a story, mind – but something. Something we can cherish, something we can continue to think about and learn from.

This is an aggressively myopic piece of filmmaking, narrated by the photographer who insists on telling us various points of view in the oh-so-bloody events of his life. Whenever he tells us anything, we are to believe that now matters and nothing else; that the prospect of life, money, girls, drugs, and killing is profound, and that we are apt to pay attention. But then we “learn,” that all of it was wrong, and he became a photographer, (to photograph violence, to exploit violence, and like the man who made this piece of trash, Fernando Meirelles, to sell it off as cautionary yet for some odd reason, exhilarating). But why is violence so consistently exhilarating, Meirelles? Why are we supposed to watch? Answer: more money, more girls, more money to create more violence. For the filmmaker, that is.

The thing that offended me most about City of God is that it is pretending to be a moral work. We see pleasure, then we see pain, and apparently we’re supposed to connect the two together. But when a killing occurs in this film, it just doesn’t matter... it is an act of impulsive masturbation, with no consequences other than directly personal: you die. And we get to watch. We get to be passive. Isn’t passiveness thrilling? Isn’t it just great when you get to watch someone go through hell?

I don’t think so. I guess I want to make it clear that not only did City of God not do anything in the slightest for me; I think it’s a genuinely disgusting piece of trash, the kind we would be better off without. It’s time filmmakers stop thinking of killing in an immediately ironic way, unable to reflect on its ramifications, on its relation to ourselves. Case in point: the recent Final Destination 2. True, an exercise in sadism, but it was sadism with actively dreading protagonists, trying to trick the self-contained world of death surrounding them into going away. In contrast, the gangsters in City of God go through the motions. They kill and they die and it looks cool and there’s music. But never once does the question occur: what else is there?

2.9.03

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