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Central Station
(Centro De Brasil)
***
Cinema
Releases - March 12, 1999
Rated on a 4-star
scale. Brazil. Directed by Walter Salles. Written by Marcos Bernstein and
Jose Emanuel Carneiro; from a story by Walter Salles. Starring Fernanda
Montenegro, Marilia Pera, Vinicius De Oliveira, Soia Lira, Othon Bastos,
Otavio Augusto, Stela Freitas, Matheus Nachtergaele.
The children of poverty-stricken nations often
tend to wander the streets. Some are homeless, some have nothing to do but
play football in the road. Some beg, and some try petty theft. Many people
feel hostility towards them -- they see only the fact that they're there,
and don't care for their hardship. They see them as parasites -- everybody's
poor, so why feel sorry for them just because they're kids?
This is one facet of the environment in
"Central Station", which opens in Rio de Janeiro's busiest
train terminal. Everybody seems to be getting in everyone else's way, and
the only familiar faces are those who clutter the edges of the area, hoping
to make a buck from some sort of market stall. In one scene, a boy attempts
to steal a small toy from a stall. The shopkeeper murders him in broad daylight,
and nobody even seems to notice.
It's not a great place for Josue (Vinicius De
Oliviera) to find himself stranded. The kid's mother has just been hit and
killed by a bus, and he has no other family. The only person in the vicinity
he recognises is a scribe, Dora (Fernanda Montenegro). Josue's mother had
dictated a letter to Dora only minutes before her death.
Writing inane letters for illiterate passers-by
is how Dora spends her days. As a retired schoolteacher, it's how she makes
ends meet. She saves as much money as possible by not mailing the letters
she doesn't want to. Of course, the letter of Josue's mother was not necessarily
inane -- she's begging Josue's absent father to return, and see the boy.
Dora had instinctively suspected the man was an abusive drunkard, and we
sensed that she was probably right.
Dora is quite the cynic, and has no wish to take
care of this child. When he approaches her for help, she tells him to scram.
Eventually, though, to meet the demands of the plot, the persistent young
man manages to put Dora in a position where she pretty much has to help him
out, and they go across country to search for his father.
Then, "Central Station" settles into a structure
that's somewhat like a regular road movie, although it's slower than most,
and the unlikely pair change gradually, and realistically. There is no big
scene where we feel a 'click', and the movie turns from sad to happy, and
although we knew that these characters would grow to like each other, the
process by which this happens is less obvious than one might suspect. I was
also surprised by how the search for the father turns out -- I expected that
they would not find anyone, and the filmmakers would attempt an emotional
scene of Dora explaining that daddy was gone forever. There is actually a
more pleasing development.
"Central Station" is still a formula picture,
however, that falls back on a lot more clichés than I would have liked.
Its atmosphere and acting are what make it worth seeing, with the director,
Walter Salles, and his cinematographer, Walter Carvalho, skilfully setting
up their shots to capture the hustle and bustle of urban Brazil. Thus, the
journey Dora and Josue take is an effective vehicle to show the poverty,
isolation and desperation of many of the country's people.
Those performances of Fernanda Montenegro and
Vinicius De Oliveira carry a lot of emotion without much change in facial
expression. They seem to be really feeling what their characters would feel,
and somehow radiate that through the screen. We're also given a beautiful
piano score, with touching simplicity, like the film itself. Not moving,
perhaps. But touching.
COPYRIGHT© 1999 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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