Central do Brasil
This is a more classic arthouse film, a bona-fide bingo of neorealism. Just because Walter Salles is a billionaire doesn’t mean he can’t be a class traitor.
This is a better film, but winning the Oscar for I’m Still Here is even better, it’s an experience he is more familiar with. This is just tourism, particularly that ending that refuses to accept poor people can be drunken louts.
It’s hard to believe that in 1997 there were so many illiterate people in Rio, but they all mention addresses deep in the sticks. Lula’s rule gets even better, the more you dig.
The plot is like a romcom between a retired schoolteacher and a little kid. After his mother gets ran over by a bus, she tasks himself with searching for his dad in an extremely rural area. But first, she tries to sell her off to some dudes who say he will be adopted by American couples. They go on a road trip to find the dad but also run away from those mobsters.
Hijinks ensue, they hitchhike, run out of money several times, steal food, get tangled in some religious festival, and get jerked around several locations, until they find the kid’s half-brothers. It seems the father has gone back to Rio to find his wife but got lost in the meantime, between mining jobs, and probably a lot of booze. He might come back home, perhaps…
The retired schoolteacher was himself an orphan for early age, and her father was a drunkard, so she can relate with the kid. But their relationship is bittersweet throughout the film, it’s still a neorealist comedy.
Can’t wait to see Pixote…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.