City of God

The genre of gangster movies (especially true story gangster movies) don’t often offer something unique. Many of these films stick to a Goodfellas formula and refuse to innovate or shake the system. Thankfully outside of the many Scorsese copies we have City of God.A joint directing effort by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, that not only tells the biographical story of the gangster Little Z but the biography of every character involved including the slums of Rio itself, the titular City of God. From low level gangsters to the mob bosses, we see how every character fits into this dark underworld. When ever a new character enters the movie pauses to give them a backstory or explain their relevance to the plot often using the voice over of the boy photographer Rocket who narrates the history of Brazilian crime and how it affected him growing up.

It is however the moments when the story stops to give an impressively edited backstory to the drug world where the movie truly shines. Specifically the genius of “the life of the apartment” montage. We see the villain Z enter an apartment full of drug dealers, the camera then cuts to years earlier, we see a steady shot fixed on the living room and front door of the apartment where they narrate the tragic lives of all the gangsters that lived there. The shot stays the same but fades to see each new owner as they attain and then lose the apartment and symbolically their power. The first owner puts their trust in an employee who then takes over apartment, they trust an employee who then kills them and takes the apartment. It is a small unique montage that shows not just the passage of time but also the tragic circular nature of the crime world. That is the beauty of this movie.

There are many other montages each unique from Little Z shooting towards the camera and growing up a year at a time between shots, through to the one where the camera is panning through the hotel rooms filled with some of Z’s victims.

It is not a straight forward narrative but a collection of short films that once edited together create a whole-story that spans over 12 years in the ghettos of Rio.

5/5