Toronto Dispatch. 1.

It's easy enough at a film festival to find a film commenting on another film, or in the case of Bruno Barreto's Last Stop 174, a dramatic feature inspired by a documentary film (Jose Padilha's anatomy of a spectacularly public and self-dramatizing bus highjacking, Bus 174), which in turn asks probing questions about the socio-economic and racial roots of that crime.

After seeing Bus 174, you found yourself asking whether there was much left to know about crime in Rio that Padilha's exhaustive cinematic inquiry hadn't unearthed. Barreto takes you back to those characters - a street kid, son of a murdered mother, and the mother who thinks that he's the son who was torn from her arms by the drug dealer to whom she owed money. He reconstructs a young man's life of crime that led to a coke spree, which in turn led to the brazen act of commandeering a city bus. It's surprising that a film about a crime of such operatic audacity doesn't have a soundtrack. Is Barreto rejecting what might make his film so obviously Brazilian?

Barreto also rejects the gestural music video style of City of God, even though the film script is by that film's screenwriter, Braulio Mantovani. After Last Stop 174 screened for the press and industry in Toronto, I heard one writer gripe about the film's homage to neo-realism in a scene that has a child shaking from what looks like an epileptic fit - which turned out to be a scam to set up a robbery of the poor soul who took pity on the shaking kid. Some things never change. I liked the neo-realist touch and the echoes of American 1970s crime dramas.

What strikes you about Barreto's drama set on the Rio streets is the close proximity of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, and the racial divide between poor blacks and rich whites. Every film about street life in Rio seems to have a panoramic shot that reveals the social topography of the city - Last Stop 174 is no exception - with the rich in gleaming high-rises along the seaside, and the poor in improvised houses, precariously perched on the hillsides that ring the town. How can the high crime rate be such a surprise, or for that matter, the fact that the prison for young men is almost completely black?

Back in 2002, George W Bush had a meeting at the White House with the president of Brazil and asked his guest whether there were blacks in Brazil. No kidding. (He clearly hadn't watched the World Cup, but this was the guy whose father was astonished on a visit to a supermarket to see an electronic scanner.) Could any Brazilian ask as uninformed a question about the United States? Bush would do well to take a look at a melodrama like Last Stop 174. It might give him a hint about what could be happening on the other side of Washington DC, where the poor folks live.

Poor folks speak wistfully about a factory facing demolition in 24 City, Jia Zhang-ke's hybrid Chinese documentary that premiered at Cannes and is showing at the TIFF. Factory 420, which had produced airplane engines, has been relocated and its site, sold to real estate speculators, is being converted to a new district called 24 City. We see the demolition of the old factory; most of those who speak in the film are either former workers who have been displaced or retired, or actors who tell similar stories. The director's previous film, Still Life, looked mostly at the landscapes as the camera ranged horizontally through territory that was to be covered by the rising waters of a dam or covered with the ugliest constructions that were funded by new wealth.

This time, Jia Zhang-ke concentrates on people, filming them in long static shots more typical of the contemporary still photography that fills commercial galleries these days. Testimony is nostalgic, sometimes tearful, when former workers talk of the days when the factory flourished, even though working conditions were dangerous and pay was minimal. Underlying these memories was a fear of the future among those pushed aside to clear its way, and a sense that money dominated everything else for the generation pushing the old one into rest homes where they sing and play cards. Funny how we didn't hear much about any of this during the Olympics, when the workers from the provinces who built the Bird's Nest stadium were sent forcibly out of Beijing. (See my article in the Wall Street Journal about a satirical painting depicting the Bird's Nest in ruins that was prevented from entering China for an exhibition during the Games.

You can see another side of that consumerism in The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World, by Weijun Chen, which looks with a flat digital perspective at a vast eatery that can serve 5000 people. Food was scarce during communism, especially in the early days, we are told, and eating well is payback for all those years of hardship - at least partial payback. The film takes us into a wedding celebration - the groom has just paid more than $10,000 to the bride's family for her hand in marriage.

But there's more than craven consumerism here, as there is with any dialectic. The kitschy restaurant that resembles a huge fortified palace is run by a woman who would not have had such authority when China was really a communist country. Was it worth it? Just ask the people who eat the 200 snakes that the restaurant serves every week.

Hunger by Steve McQueen is playing at the same festival with The Biggest Restaurant. More about that film in the next dispatch.

- David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at September 6, 2008 9:09 AM