There is a feeling of watching the "Young and Dangerous" series of films. Comic characters, strong and exaggerated movements, intense and rapid rhythm changes, and wave after wave of story ups and downs. It is a lens combination that has both sound vision and depressive feeling at the same time. Looking at the story of one person, two people and three people, it makes people feel emotional. It turns out that people living in a poor and chaotic world and falling into the abyss of violence step by step are similar regardless of race or color.
However, there are still some differences. If the "Young and Dangerous" series is a long focal length, it magnifies the kindness and numbness, struggle and helplessness of human nature on those gangsters, focusing on individual people, "City of God" is more like It is a wide-angle lens, which compresses all kinds of poverty and violence, conflicts and changes in a slum into a social picture. In contrast, it focuses on the whole, the essence, and therefore more thickness.
In "City of God", everything has its own laws. Life is a kind of gambling, and being alive is a kind of accident. The bloody and violent law of the jungle has become the breathing air. As long as you are still in this slum, everyone can't be alone. They have been or may be part of the dark world.
What's pitiful is that even for those who kill people who are dehumanized, the director did not only write about their "evil", but also pointed out their "pure" and "good" side. To be honest, those people are still children, eager to get a beautiful camera, annoyed that they are so ugly that they can't catch up with their girlfriends, and angry that their actions are not taken seriously by the people around them. In such a city, their experience of drugs, guns, and death surpassed their experience of studying, working, and family. They can’t distinguish between good and evil, or are willing to be evil, just because no one has taught them the basic concepts of good and evil, and the world they live in is not a secure world where good people can live in peace. There are many good lives. Opportunities are closed to them, except to become stronger and more cruel, they can't get more.
In such a city, even the line between good and bad is blurred. A group of six or seven-year-old children grew up together. Apart from playing football, they ran errands for the big brothers who had stepped on the world. When the police came, they played cover for people in the same community regardless of black and white. They will be bullied and then resist insignificantly. Children with stronger personalities will taste the sweetness of violence from then on, and go out of control to the bloody road of black power, and then either be killed by the enemy or by the police. Annihilate. Other children, after having had such a bleak black childhood, will marry wives and have children, find a less money-making but normal job, and maintain the family. However, they are still members of this deformed city, and their lives and dignity cannot be guaranteed. I don't know which day their regular lives will be broken, and then they ignited their anger, regained their guns and Molotov cocktails, and returned to the path of violence with the mentality of revenge for their loved ones. …Only a handful of lucky children, with their own efforts, finally walked out of the city and were able to try another dignified life outside the slums. Such a path is as lucky and accidental as winning the lottery.
I thought of the "New York Gangs" that year. It is also a film about the underworld. This film has a different perspective from "City of God" and "Young and Dangerous". More, it portrays the rise and fall of the gang from the perspective of historical analysis, as well as its relationship with mainstream society. The complex relationship. However, in the latter two works, the gangs themselves form a world, in which there are ups and downs, togetherness and gathering. As long as the environment of poverty and violence remains unchanged, just to survive, all dark stories will repeat itself again and again. , The heroes fold out, endlessly.
One night, I fell into such a quagmire. In those beautiful and neat shots, watch those children struggle, struggle, and decline from generation to generation, and vanish in a violent career that is half-dreaming and half-awake. Suddenly I thought, in such a "City of God", things like people are really as small as dust.
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