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A
friend of mine considers it the best motion picture he has ever seen.
But it isn’t a “civic work”, to watch it as Zuenir Ventura has
defined. In “City of God”, everything passes by the viewer’s
eyes like something magic, that just exists in that projection, while,
in real life, some of its 3,5 millions viewers probably did not come
back home alive.
Another
point the picture touches is the good and evil thing inside the the
evil and good thing. First Fernando Meirelles defines who are the
bandits and who are the good guys. Then he defines who is the bad
bandit and who is the good bandit. But the director doesn’t
remember that a bandit is a bandit, a criminous like any other.
I don’t want to sound like our Secretary of Public Security, a
little boy that seemed to have a little moustache and carry a swastika
when he said about the deaths in a shooting in Ilha do Governador that
“they weren`t twelve people, they were twelve traffickers”. But
show the public that Cenoura and company were good guys and make us
cheer for them is something really serious.
The
publicity becomes more and more clear when the slum is brought into
the television with the serie “City of Men” (Cidade dos Homens),
of Rede Globo. Historically, the Brazilian society used to satirize
everything it doesn’t know how to deal, like migrants and
homossexuals, characters that, estereotyped as bumpkins and fags, make us laugh in the Saturday nights. And now it’s the
time of the citrics Laranjinha and Acerola. Their expressions take the
streets. The spoken language of the slum, specially when it reffers to
the Portuguese mistakes, result of the lack of an education that
should be universal, provokes laughs in parks and bars. One day, a
classmate of mine, who makes the Publicity course in Federal
Fluminense University, told me that he became a big fan of the series,
specially because in the previous episode a character called another
“norotic” (norótico), making this classmate stand up and aplaud.
However, in the same scene, a man was on his knees with a gun in his
head. And that’s what scares: this classmate didn’t notice it
because he didn’t see or because it has become so banal in
television that doesn’t deserve atention anymore?
While
Laranjinha and Acerola make fun and go to Brasília to deliver a
letter to the president, Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha, the actors,
complain that after the fame some ladies still hold tight their purses,
afraid of beeing robbed by them. And this prejudice is the same that
makes people laugh. As long as they are black boys they have no
identity - this is the one our society built for them with its
disregard. But it would be worse if the ladies, recognizing Laranjinha
and Acerola, became more relieved and thought: “Oh, these represent
no problem...”.
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