City of Men

Paulo Morelli’s City of Men proceeds with the woefully providential trajectory of a classic tragedy, or a 1930s Warner Bros. crime melodrama. Actually, Morelli seems to be trying to strike notes from both of those.

Although the emphasis in this tightly constructed Brazilian film is on swift, sometimes dense action and sharply conflicted characters and behavior, it has easily perceived threads of sentiment and poignance.

City of Men had its origins in a popular Brazilian television series (shown in the States on the Sundance Channel). It’s also a kind of complement to City of God, the 2002 international hit by Morelli’s frequent collaborator, Fernando Meirelles, who is a producer for this one.

Acerola, or “Ace” (Douglas Silva), and Wallace (Darlan Cunha), the two almost-18-year-olds who are the film’s protagonists, were briefly seen as children in the first film. They’re still fast friends here, bound to each other by a mutual loyalty, as well as the straitened conditions in their steeply angled slum neighborhood high above the shining city of Rio and its tawny beaches.

City of Men is, at its center, a search for family ties and identity, sometimes literally. As it opens, Wallace is facing the prospect of registering for an official ID document without being able to provide the authorities with his father’s name. He travels around the district earnestly trying to elicit that name from his elders.

Ace, who is already the father of an infant, knows his parent’s name but the man was murdered before he ever knew him.

As each youth moves uncertainly toward establishing a more secure sense of self, he’s maneuvered by neighborhood forces, including an escalating war between three young gangs.

Meirelle’s movie also dealt with youth gangs and slum life, but it unfolded with a picaresque, slightly ironic, mildly exaggerated, sometimes stylized storytelling—even though it was based on the facts of an actual life.

This one is more serious in tone, and its ironies are sadder. Morelli has fashioned a film that moves surely, and with increasing pace, towards a stark and violent—though not graphically so—climax. But he holds out a kind of risky hope at the end.

—george sax