Dir.
Sergio Machado, Brazil, 2005, 97 mins, subtitles
Cast:
Lazaro Ramos, Wagner Moura, Alice Braga, Maria Menezes
As the title implies Brazilian film Lower City deals with characters on the fringes of society. It charts the intense love triangle between best friends Deco and Naldinho and Karinna, the girl who can't decide between them. Boasting incendiary performances and explosive eroticism perhaps the film's greatest achievement is to take certain stereotypes - the boxer, the hustler and the stripper - and completely re-invigorate them. The central characters never feel less than complex human beings in all their messed-up glory.
'I'm interested in films that speak about people, not about great events' says Director Sergio Machado, 'this story is not an expose of the living conditions among waterfront prostitutes and hustlers. It's a story about people like us, who desire, feel, love, suffer, weep, get horny, get pissed, have orgasms, it's good and it's bad, it's violent and it's peaceful.' Although Deco and Naldinho promise each other that a woman will never come between them they become rivals for Karinna's affections.
One of the reasons that Lower City feels very fresh is because the story is uncluttered by political baggage. The decision to concentrate, in a non-judgmental way, on lower-class characters on the borders of criminality implies a leftist political stance and the comparison of the 'Lower City' of the title to Brazil and Latin America more generally is tempting. However there seems to be a wave of Latin American films emerging that are moving on from explicit ideology to reach a broader audience.
Films such as Amores Perros, Y tu Mama Tambien, Central Station, Japon, City of God and The Motorcycle Diaries , to name a few, do not define themselves purely in relation to the protracted structural domination of the North-Western hemisphere nor do they retreat into the ethnography of pre-conquest civilisations. Now there is also the possibility of films that explore the heterogeneity of Latin America today, which look into the mirror rather than over their shoulder and do not need to justify themselves through victim hood or reference to anywhere else.
One sign is that increasingly we are talking about national cinemas rather than Latin American cinema. Of course these films still have political agendas, and some are more political than others, but the ability to adopt a stance other than strident polemic is also a form of liberation. A film such as City of God examines social problems with an eye to bringing about the conditions for their improvement rather than simply apportioning blame and reducing a complex phenomenon. It's also very entertaining.
Lower City makes its own statement. It stakes a claim for the humanity of its characters and presumes a common ground with the audience. In that sense it turns the tables on euro-centric humanism. Machado says: 'a love triangle always ends in tragedy. It's always about impossibility, even in the most modern versions like 'Jules et Jim'. I tried to view the issue from a different perspective. The question we asked when we were writing the script was, 'Why not? What keeps these people from being happy?'
'In Bahia [the region in Brazil ], issues are resolved through a logic which is not necessarily that of confrontation, but of accommodation for survival.' A compelling, affecting and formidably sexy story, Lower City also unapologetically presents its own values, those of the characters, and a different take on a familiar story. This unblinking emphasis on human beings has its own subversive potential and the cast rise to the occasion. It's thoroughly absorbing.
Peter Fraser
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