Cause and effect make for good story-telling. This is true when writing history and writing movies. Readers and audiences feel comfort when a narrative centers on sympathetic characters with clear motives and simple goals. Blockbuster movies and history textbooks alike provide us with hopeful conclusions that resolve the conflict given in the premise. But simple stories create simple knowledge, and too often historical fiction prioritize the elite and privileged as a convenience to these narratives. Those born into power are the drivers of history and the rest of humanity are merely passengers along for the ride.
While most studios adhere to this structure by churning out biopics, the rare movie breaks the mold of simplified history to reach a nuanced vantage into the past. 2002’s City of God accomplishes this by following a single neighborhood (the favela the film is named for) between 1960 and 1980. In its narrative and aesthetic, City of God establishes the favela as the site of history. Directors Fernando Merielles and Katia Lund weave a community tapestry that focuses on lived experiences over cause and effect explanations of the past.
Often remembered as a crime epic or coming-of-age story, City of God doesn’t immediately appear to be a great work of historical fiction. The film tracks a favela through a 20-year period of aggressive urbanization and consuming gang violence. Our narrator is Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), a teenager who dreams of becoming a great photographer. Rocket guides the viewer through the film with a stream-of-conscious narration: he starts anecdotes only to pause them and start a new one, or doubles back on his explanation to introduce a new character or provide context. Watching City of God is like listening to a story from a cherished elder. You are meant to lose yourself down its intimate corridors, rather than notice the changes happening in the background of the frame. While most films would focus on the political and culture shifts in Brazil, City of God lingers in the chasms that such changes leave behind. The film inverts classic historical narratives to push the margin to the center and the powerful to the outskirts.
Characters in City of God appear larger-than-life, with most of the action following the generations of gangs that control the City of God. Rocket and his neighbors begin the film admiring the Tender Trio, a group of roguish gangsters that act as Robin Hood figures in the 1960s. Their protege, Lil Z, takes their mantel once the police murder the Tender Trio. An insecure psychopath, Lil Z kills wantonly and builds a drug empire enforced with brutality. His destructive rules create vigilantes that attempt to stand up to him, but this next generation turns as violent as Lil Z in their war against criminals. Each generation of criminals claims power by outdoing the brutality of the previous iteration.
The cyclical nature of violence is a central motif in the film, and Rocket reminds us throughout the film that “a gangster never stops, a gangster takes a break.” The film opens in media-res with Rocket standing between two lines of gangs, pointing their weapons at one another. Like his neighbors in the City of God, our narrator is trapped between the escalating violence. Rocket is not just an observer to the events unfolding around him but is instead immersed and implicated in their repercussions. His place is vital to the community history Merielles and Lund are showing the audience. Though the narrator, Rocket doesn’t claim an elevated perspective on the community because his personal history and the neighborhood’s past are entwined.
But life in the City of God doesn’t occur in a vacuum and throughout the film we see glimpses of an evolving Brazil, and how it engenders the conflicts in Rocket’s life. The setting of Rio de Janeiro gradually shifts from gravel roads and single-family homes to concrete plazas and towering apartment buildings. Rocket’s home, previously an open landscape hinting at opportunity and freedom, transitions to an outright ghetto that chokes Rocket’s dreams and ambitions. The police oscillate between oppressive and indifferent, pursuing gangs when they threaten Rio’s wealthy and selling them weapons to kill each other in the favela’s streets. The corrupt officers are a microcosm of the right-wing dictatorship in Brazil, which spent the 70s and 80s stifling civil liberties and ignoring drug violence. The film doesn’t waste time explaining these policies to either the audience or its subjects. The textbook becomes irrelevant when history unfolds on your doorstep. The film concludes that the City of God was doomed by internal and external factors. The neglect of a corrupt government inspires residents to idolize outlaw behaviors as revolutionary ones, but those criminals show equal disregard for the neighborhood’s well-being. It’s a nuanced diagnosis of poverty in Brazil’s favelas, but one that the filmmakers do not deliver in a heavy-handed way. Instead, the film arranges its color scheme and mood to mark the decay of the community.
Though we are shown periodic title cards with years, City of God organizes its timeline with an evolving soundtrack and color palette. A sepia-toned first act paired with rustic samba tunes portrays the favela as an idyllic home. Later, that image will give way to crowded cement buildings and aggressive, funk-infused needle drops. Merielles and Lund demarcate eras by mood and vibe, matching the increasing pessimism through which the residents see their home.
As our narrator Rocket progresses in his photography career, the film evolves into a multimedia collage, using freeze-frames and television inserts to explain the story. The influx of new technology shapes how the neighborhood sees itself, and City of God weaves that new awareness into its own texture. The presence of cameras in City of God can now capture the corruption and violence that the residents have been struggling against. Rocket’s photography documents the truth of what his community experiences each day, a wry admission by the filmmakers that their work in City of God doesn’t provide a wholly new insight into the favela’s past, but merely translates that community history for the medium of film.
Nearly 20 years after it was released, City of God is a breath-taking watch, chock-full of sorrow, triumph, and humor. The film is sleek without ever being simplistic, gliding through a neighborhood in perceptual flux and uncertainty. Some movies attempt to explain the past; fewer are brave enough to inhabit the past, witnessing the communities that exist in the wake of societal shifts. City of God is an epic of people’s history worth revisiting.
