Easy Pain, Easy Death:
Reviews of "City of God"
and "Rabbit-Proof Fence"

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

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Life is cheap in the sprawling Black slums or favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is this cheapness, not only in terms of easy, quick death but also of pitiful wasted life, that is at the heart of "City of God," a brutal, sometimes brutally honest and troubling film by Fernando Meirelles that tells the story of one man's way out.

There are multiple layers of story and meaning here: First, we can listen simply to our hero, Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), tell the violent and entertaining stories of three generations of neighborhood hoodlums, complete with petty stick-ups, random shootings and naked people caught wrong in the bed. Told in a manic, souped-up style, with lots of creative camera work and fast-paced editing, this trendy, edgy layer of the film is what grabs us and makes us laugh at the young men and boys whose lives are as disposable as a condom.

Second, we might see through the story how dehumanized these young men are. Through our giggles at their trigger-happy antics, perhaps the film asks that we think about whether it is easier to laugh at them than to face who they really are and how their world and our "global" world has shaped them. And finally, maybe Americans might wonder if, in the push for edge, attitude and rawness in film—except of course when it comes to important films about White folks—if ghetto people must always be made so animal-like to both entertain us and justify their miserable life station.

"City of God," somewhat similar to "Gangs of New York," offers the entertainment of dehumanization and senseless, cheap killing. Coming from Brazil, a country more blatantly racist than the U.S., with the largest population of African descendents outside of Africa, "City of God" contains this animal-like behavior within the slums where the majority of people, if they lived in the United States, would be categorized as Black. It hints that there are racial divisions: a few of the lighter-skinned poor folks call darker ones "niggers" and there is a true sense that City of God is a Brazilian version of a South African bantustand. But, except for these instances, Meirelles deals less with his country's paranoid obsession with race, color and classification and more with Black ghetto pathology and self-destruction as a fascinating yarn.

The villain, L'il Ze (Leandro Firmino da Hora), is a very Black, "ugly" man with a broad nose and full lips. Our hero, Rocket, is also very Black with African features and, like L'il Ze, has not had much success with the opposite sex. This failure in the mack-daddy department is a running joke throughout the film and allows the audience to feel both sympathy and pity for Rocket. He chooses to hang with a crowd where he is the only Black person. He loves a White girl who gives him no rhythm but falls for a lighter-skinned Black man who dyes his curly hair blonde. As always here, (and as the long-time hype has gone in Brazil), the way out is to get as White as you can, get with some White folks—because, after all, they have all the houses, wealth and education—and get the hell away from all these shooting, senseless Negroes.

Australia's Shameful History

The wiry fence that traverses thousands of miles in Australia serves as a mighty metaphor in "Rabbit-Proof Fence," a powerful film that tells the story of how, from 1900 to 1970, the White Australian government kidnapped young Aborigine girls and trained them to be domestics for Whites. The brutality, racism and genocidal agenda of the British-controlled government sits on one side of our metaphorical fence, while the Black natives of the island, along with their basic human rights, certainly sit on the other.

The girls taken were called "half-caste" because one of their parents, usually the father, was White. There is no explanation of how the initial relationships were sparked but none of the Black women whose children were taken had a White husband standing at her side. The government reserved the right to determine if interracial marriages were "legal" and also hoped to engineer the eventual erasure of the Aborigine people by assimilating "half-castes" and continually mixing them with Whites. The Black people of Australia call these kidnapped children, many of whom never saw their mothers again and who are estimated to number in the thousands, the "stolen generations."

Adapted from the book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, Christine Olsen's screenplay gives power to this heinous chapter of history. It focuses on the true story of Molly (played by Everlyn Sampi), her litle sister Daisy (Tiana Sansbury) and her cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan), who in 1931 were kidnapped from their mothers in Jigalong, a remote Aboriginal community in Western Australia. Driven 1200 miles south, a part of the way locked in a cage, the children eventually fled on foot from Moore River Settlement, the government-controlled mission where they were forbidden to use their language and told that they did not have mothers. As the children try to find their way home, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" offers powerful ideas about mother, family and the defiance of wicked power.

It does not flinch from telling the story: how Aborigines referred to White government officials as "Mr. Devil," the inconsolable grief felt by mothers and grandmothers when their children were snatched away. As the wailing girls are taken away in a police wagon, Molly's silver-haired grandmother beats herself repeatedly in the head with a rock, almost as if to kill herself.

Filmed in the Australian Outback by director Philip Noyce (The Quiet American," "The Bone Collector), "Rabbit-Proof Fence" has a visual poetry that highlights the links between the awe-inspiring and harsh landscape and the people. As she journeys home, Molly uses her knowledge of the earth and nature to outwit the wise Aborigine tracker, who was forced by Whites to hunt down and return the girls to Moore River Settlement.

African American audiences, exposed to more stories about our own slavery and less to stories about other people of the African diaspora, will find much to identify in this story about far-off European colonialism. Just as startling as the story is Samperly's portrayal of a young clear-eyed Black woman who is certain the world is wrong, that she is right and that she has the power to fix her world.

Esther Iverem's reviews often appear on BET.com and Africana.com.

Related Sites:

• Official Site: City of God
• Official Site: Rabbit-Proof Fence

-- February 3, 2003

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