Central do Brasil
Central do Brasil (Central Station) is amazing. To say only that's one of the greatest movies ever it's unjust. It's much more than a great movie. It's so heavy in human values that it couldn't carry more. Behind the apparent serenity of the cinematic eye, calmly following the abject and the divine that are mixed together, behind this is a burning, passionate belief in the infinite capacity of redemption that's hidden in us.
Says movie director Walter Salles, I come from a country and a continent whose identity is in the making, where things are not yet crystallized. And that's true for each of his personages; like their country, their characters are on the making, they are on the road. The kid, Josué (played incredibly by Vinicius de Oliveira, a shoe shine boy found by Walter Salles on the street), can become a crock, like old Dora (the great Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro). After all also Dora came in life from a similar childhood. Anything can happen, and the movie does not want to say us explicitly what will be with them in the future.
The end of the movie is open potentially to any outcome, however the tone is optimist. The director doesn't know what will happen to Josué and to Dora; however he cannot look at their adventures but with an immense sympathy, for Josué is looking for his father while Dora is looking for her chance in life, and on the road they open themselves more and more one to the other.
A road where picaresque happenings come one after the other, abjection and unexpected humanity, mishaps in a chain solved by unexpected miracles, it's Brazil, land of extremes, open, like Josué and Dora, to any future, a country followed by the eye of Salles with an immense sympathy, because the country is also on the road, like the heroes.
And says again Walter Salles, I don't think we can say what the Latin American identity is, but I think we can try to look for the reverberations from it... and for this, you have to try to capture reality as it happens.
(Iberic and Iberic-American Cinema)
Says movie director Walter Salles, I come from a country and a continent whose identity is in the making, where things are not yet crystallized. And that's true for each of his personages; like their country, their characters are on the making, they are on the road. The kid, Josué (played incredibly by Vinicius de Oliveira, a shoe shine boy found by Walter Salles on the street), can become a crock, like old Dora (the great Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro). After all also Dora came in life from a similar childhood. Anything can happen, and the movie does not want to say us explicitly what will be with them in the future.
The end of the movie is open potentially to any outcome, however the tone is optimist. The director doesn't know what will happen to Josué and to Dora; however he cannot look at their adventures but with an immense sympathy, for Josué is looking for his father while Dora is looking for her chance in life, and on the road they open themselves more and more one to the other.
A road where picaresque happenings come one after the other, abjection and unexpected humanity, mishaps in a chain solved by unexpected miracles, it's Brazil, land of extremes, open, like Josué and Dora, to any future, a country followed by the eye of Salles with an immense sympathy, because the country is also on the road, like the heroes.
And says again Walter Salles, I don't think we can say what the Latin American identity is, but I think we can try to look for the reverberations from it... and for this, you have to try to capture reality as it happens.
(Iberic and Iberic-American Cinema)
Labels: Walter Salles
posted by Pierre Radulescu at
9:53 AM
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