I watched City of God on Friday night. My boyfriend has been urging me to watch it for a while - it's his favourite movie, and I can see why. He's a cameraman, and it is magnificently shot.
The colours are intense and moody and the angles really take you inside the story and inside the world, while not blatantly revealing everything on camera. Often the visuals will tell you just enough, and the cutting and sound effects paint the rest of the gory picture. It's obviously a very well-made, clever film, and I found it quite a gutteral experience. The story matter was quite hard to swallow for me - the film is full of murder, rape, drug use, abuse, corruption and poverty - everything that could make the world of the film hell on earth, rather than a City of God.
One thing that got in the way of my appreciation of the film though was a problem with the subtitles. This is such a pity, because it is surely a simple thing to fix. The film is entirely in Portuguese - the language of Brazil - so as an English speaker I was totally reliant on the subtitles to properly understand the plot. Normally it takes only a few minutes of watching a film with subtitles for me to get into an easy habit and reading speed that allows me to take in all of the visual and aural information and subtitles at the same time. With City of God, this could not happen because many of the subtitles were out of time with what was going on on the screen. Sometimes the title would appear before a person spoke, or sometimes after. Because of this, it was impossible for me to get into that easy habit and rhythm, which made it hard to keep up with the story at times.
This was also made more difficult by the similarity in the appearances of the characters. I think that in films aimed at a white audience, the casting director usually puts some effort into distinguishing characters of same sex and age from one another by choosing actors with different hair or skin types, or at least by choosing actors with distinguishing features. This helps the audience identify characters more quickly. In City of God, this was not the case. Almost all of the characters were male (the only female characters were peripheral to the story) and all of them had black skin and black fuzzy hair. And because we were following the stories of a group of characters as they grew up, they were also the same age as one another. For these reasons it was hard to identify characters in the beginning, and therefore hard to associate later adult characters with the child versions that had previously been shown.
The colours are intense and moody and the angles really take you inside the story and inside the world, while not blatantly revealing everything on camera. Often the visuals will tell you just enough, and the cutting and sound effects paint the rest of the gory picture. It's obviously a very well-made, clever film, and I found it quite a gutteral experience. The story matter was quite hard to swallow for me - the film is full of murder, rape, drug use, abuse, corruption and poverty - everything that could make the world of the film hell on earth, rather than a City of God.
One thing that got in the way of my appreciation of the film though was a problem with the subtitles. This is such a pity, because it is surely a simple thing to fix. The film is entirely in Portuguese - the language of Brazil - so as an English speaker I was totally reliant on the subtitles to properly understand the plot. Normally it takes only a few minutes of watching a film with subtitles for me to get into an easy habit and reading speed that allows me to take in all of the visual and aural information and subtitles at the same time. With City of God, this could not happen because many of the subtitles were out of time with what was going on on the screen. Sometimes the title would appear before a person spoke, or sometimes after. Because of this, it was impossible for me to get into that easy habit and rhythm, which made it hard to keep up with the story at times.
This was also made more difficult by the similarity in the appearances of the characters. I think that in films aimed at a white audience, the casting director usually puts some effort into distinguishing characters of same sex and age from one another by choosing actors with different hair or skin types, or at least by choosing actors with distinguishing features. This helps the audience identify characters more quickly. In City of God, this was not the case. Almost all of the characters were male (the only female characters were peripheral to the story) and all of them had black skin and black fuzzy hair. And because we were following the stories of a group of characters as they grew up, they were also the same age as one another. For these reasons it was hard to identify characters in the beginning, and therefore hard to associate later adult characters with the child versions that had previously been shown.
No comments:
Post a Comment