Dir. José Padilha & Felipe Lacerda, 2002 , Brazil , Portuguese with English subtitles, 150 mins
Cast:
Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, Sandro do Nascimento, Rodrigo Pimentel, Luiz Eduardo Soares
A botched robbery on a Rio de Janeiro city bus escalates into a four-hour standoff between the police and the thief who has taken several passengers hostage. News footage broadcast live on Brazilian television records the increasing agitation and furious ranting of the hostage taker, the panic on the faces of his young women hostages, and the mismanaged attempts of the police to end the siege as chaos unfolds around them.
Jose Padilha begins his reconstruction of the true events of 12th June 2000, when a young homeless man named Sandro do Nascimento attempted to rob the passengers of bus 174. Through the testimony of hostages and a number of the police officers involved, combined with the fascinating, if irresponsible news coverage of the day, Padilha builds a terrible sense of tension - the final montage of news film showing the climax of siege in slow motion and from several angles is massively compelling. But Padilha does more than repackage the 'news of the day' for a cinema audience, he delves behind the headlines to depict a story which began to unravel long before Sandro do Nascimento boarded bus 174.
Through the accounts of friends, his aunt, a dedicated social worker and an elderly woman who treated him as a son, we hear of a life of hardship punctuated by horror. Not only did Sandro witness the murder of his mother at the age of six, he was also a survivor of Candelária - a massacre of homeless people by police officers, in which a number of his friends died. Padilha builds a picture of a young man, often shy and clearly damaged by his experiences but very far from the aggressive criminal who dominated Brazil 's TV screens for a few hours in June 2000.
Perhaps because the film is made for an informed audience who are aware of the social background, there is little examination of the political context and the racism in Brazilian society. However Padilha does weave a narrative thread throughout the film which identifies the homeless and the poor as the 'invisible people' of Brazilian society. This invisibility is nowhere more apparent than in the terrible shots of the city's overcrowded prisons, dungeons where the guilty and innocent alike are kept out of sight.
Like City of God and Cirandiru, Padilha's film forces us to see the suffering and to hear the angry voice of his country's underclass. As fellow filmmaker Arnaldo Jabor wrote of Bus 174 for a Brazilian newspaper recently: "We never cared about the slums. Now because of fear, at least little by little, the consciousness of our unbearable poverty is growing."
Elizabeth Griffin
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