Bus 174 - A-
Now Playing: (2003, Jose Padilha) [seen in theatre]
This wonderful year for documentaries just keeps on truckin' with perhaps the best one yet, a film that documents and delves into a 2000 Rio de Janeiro bus hijacking. First-time feature director Padilha starts beautifully, with a long helicopter shot over Rio, beginning with the city we've all seen- beachfront resorts and tall buildings- then continuing over a hill until we see miles of slums. Padilha's goal with this film is to shed light on the hardships of the poor in his country, who are abandoned by society and brutalized by the government. The hijacker, Sandro do Nascimiento, was but one of these people, witnessing his mother's death as a teen, living on the streets, institutionalized in a detention home and then in prison. These may sound like the pieties which are presented by many liberal realist filmmakers, but Padilha juxtaposes scenes about Sandro's past with news footage from the incident, which was the most heavily-televised news story in Brazilian history up to that point. The crime scene was a chaotic mess from the get-go, since the police failed to establish a perimeter, and most of the officers on the scene were ill-trained for such a situation. As the film unspools, the alternating between the two stories rachets up the tension (this is no doubt helped by the fact that this will be many Americans' first exposure to the incident), until the penultimate moments of the incident, when we've become absorbed in the incident because we've learned about the perpetrator's past. Plus the film features two of the most engrossing scenes of the year, in purely cinematic terms anyway. The first is a harrowing visit to an overcrowded Brazilian jail, filmed using a negative image (like the negatives of a photo- not sure what the technical name is), which serves to make the scene all the more hellish. The second is in the final moments of the hijacking, during which Padilha slows down the action to a crawl, building suspense through inevitability- we see what's happening onscreen, and we're powerless to stop it. Perhaps Padilha's points aren't new- after all, we've been hearing for years about how so many governments abandon the poor- but this film doesn't presume to know the answers to the poverty and crime questions, and as long as there are no answers these questions will never cease to be important.