Fridae

Once upon a time, there was a City of God. Not the book by St Augustine, but the blood soaked, sun-drenched, hyperactive gangster film set in the tenements of Brazil and edited like an music video. We loved it and so did lots of aspiring filmmakers everywhere who cut their teeth making short films about gangsters that looked like music videos and video games on crack and worried a lot of censors who thought this made crime look too hip, fun and entertaining.

I’m told that back home, it spawned an entire television series (titled Cidade dos homens) starring the two scary little tykes from the original movie. Now that they’re all grown up, it’s time to bring them back to the big screen.

We’re back in the familiar world of street gangsters on perpetual adolescence, reigning as the kings of their very little hills and tenements in a Brazil that’s again shot with oversaturated colours and gritty film stock. The theme is hardly unfamiliar: the interplay between past and present, the fatalistic inevitability of violence, the ephemeral nature of life on the edge.

But where City of God was a music video that happened to be about gangsters, City of Men is a television soap, a drama that takes place in the world of gangsters. On one hand, a certain joie de vivre is lost in the change in genre and style, but on the other hand, City of Men is a far more mature work and takes a more grown-up, less celebratory approach to tenement life and gangsters than its predecessor.

In particular, the dramatic impulse of this film derives from its exploration of the very tangled relationships between fathers and sons, between ‘brothers’, and between friends and families. The trade-off is a loss of easy entertainment, but at least this time round, you won’t be laughing when the blood begins to flow down the streets.