Rating of
3/4
"City Of Men" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 02/19/12
As two friends from the slums of Rio approach their 18th birthdays, a war between two gangs tears their community apart. Continuing the themes of City Of God, City Of Men takes up the story of life in the Brazilian ghetto as the boys become "men", brought up in an society where the family unit is all but defunct. Girls have to grow up at a very young age in an environment where they have no access to contraception and no money for abortion clinics, made pregnant by boys who have no roots, no emotional connections or sense of responsibility as they grew up without role models, having been brought up fatherless themselves and left to fend alone on the dog eat dog streets while their mothers go out to work. The film has the same combination of excellent visuals, intelligent characterisation and amazingly naturalistic performances of the original. It doesn't quite have the same sense of complexity or originality of City Of God, but does once again manage to create a real sense of what it must be like to grow up on these mean streets, showing the incredibly tense gun battles through the darkened slums as anything but glamorous and appealing. It does share the same underlying message as well; if the cycle is not broken, then history will continue repeating itself and nothing will ever change.
