LOwer City Cidade Baixa

Ensaio crítico de Kelly Tavares:

Cidade Baixa

Lower City

Director:

Sergio Machado

Cast:

Lazaro Ramos, Wagner Moura, Alice Braga, Jose Dumont

Cidade baixa or Lower City is a powerful movie that adopts a very specific site in Salvador city one of overwhelming and boiling capitals of the Brazilian culture. Instead of being on common places the movie adopts a controversial plot that leads the spectator to an also intriguing environement. These emotional turbulences that permeate the story may be misunderstood by North Americans due to the Cultural differences and values. But if you're able to see over the lenses and pre concepts you may have some insights about human nature.

Sometimes, knowing the culture of a determined place is fundamental to better understand the symbols and icons of an art work.

I myself don't like violence and sexual appeals to gather the audience in a movie. Although I could understand the way these topics were explored in this movie and I could defend this point based on the symbols that it contains and on my culture as a Brazilian. Of course it doesn't redeem the strong appealing that sensual scenes evoque on our instincts, specially when their created in such a hot and primitive way. The way of senses and primitive desire, pure flesh desire, later converted in equal powerful and uncontrolled, devastating love.

All these points are due to a life stile that generates that. It is on everyday Brazilian newspapers fragmented narratives of lives involved on misery and lack of perspectives.

On this movie we have an opportunity to go further the official” facts printed on the news, we have an opportunity to understand social relations and human feelings that may flow under specific situations according to place and culture.

For those who were terrified with the rooster’s fight, should had written at the end where there was a clear note regarding the rights of this animals and clarifying that they weren’t taken to death and it was also part of the fiction. Although, they were describing a crude reality that is going on everyday in many places despite the laws’ restrictions. The symbolism between black and white related to the rooster’s colors has a direct relation between the fight that both friends will get through against one another later and also implies the racial conflicts that still enclose our cultures and it is explicit more as a matter of fact then as an implicit incentive to violence. In the contrary, the close ups on the eyes of the protagonists at the very end of the movie reveals the complicity of these friends whose eyes clearly shows the consciousness of their irrational fight. That is a final moment of redeem, after a violent catharsis.

For those who expected a happy end a social perspective as the directors proposal, I answer that the eyes close- ups were this subjective and subliminal message of love, comprehension and friendship as an alternative to the social miseries of our cruel world.

If they would finally get to a peaceful understanding and deal who knows. The authors knowledgeably lets the end rests on its on chance, without a resolution. As a metaphor to the fact that life goes with its incongruence. As a message that transmits the inability of the cinema and of art to solve social problems itself. A moral quote at the end would put on risk the quality of the movie and compromise the subtleness of the messages implicit in the body language.

For those who doesn't know

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