Director: Sérgio Machado
Year: 2005
I first saw Sérgio Machado‘s electrifying film around a year ago, but the BFI‘s Brazil on Film season, taking place across May and June in London, offered the opportunity to finally see it on the big screen as it deserves. The two-month season is delivering gem after gem so far – if you’re able, dive into it, either at their South Bank site or online on BFI Player.
Lower City presents a fucked-up love triangle involving – to quote a fellow moviegoer as they emerged from the cinema – the most toxic people in the world. A boxer, a prostitute and a robber (Brazilian big-hitters Lázaro Ramos, Alice Braga and Wagner Moura, all at their early-career best): each of these very young adults, muddling their way carelessly through life on the underside of urban society, are wildly in love with each other; increasingly willing to betray each other; and completely unable to walk away from each other. Mix competing male egos into this unhealthy stew, and you have a searing, visceral character study of three people doing… not the best they can, perhaps, but what they know how to do, in the face of the limited options open to them.
Life in Salvador is indeed a tale of two cities, partly demarcated by a cliff, a geological fault and an economic divide. While tourists may be more familiar with the economic centre of the Upper City, the Historic Center’s Skittle-bright colonial architecture and Salvador’s rich cultural scenes, the Lower City presents the seamy, sketchy underworld of the less visible side – strip clubs, docks, cheap bars and extremely murky cruise ships that sex workers filter through for a night’s work – and what survival looks like when your main resources are your body and your wits.
While the action explodes in the foreground, political questions are asked silently, as the story lays bare the social and personal cost of economic hardship. Alice Braga sketches out Karina, the 20 year old hooker, with disturbing matter-of-factness; an exposed life under flickering neon, in dark alleys and wherever else the money is, is simply the reality for many young women with few other means of survival. So is the easy exposure to crime that Lázaro Ramos and Wagner Moura’s characters have navigated since childhood. While the hard knocks of the boxing ring offer Ramos’ Deco a less dodgy way ahead, Moura’s Naldinho can’t see beyond an immediate reality of ill-planned stick-up jobs and drug-dealing. (This is one of several opportunities to catch these real-life best friends onscreen together; as expected, their chemistry is terrific, and in an interview with O Globo, they shared the physically and emotionally punishing preparation required to turn years of friendship into onscreen hatred in Lower City’s most bruising scene.) Unspoken questions also hang in the air about the gringos who frequent the waters around Salvador, picking their way through the coke and young women commercially available to them.
The film deservedly picked up the Youth Prize for Machado at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as a slew of Brazilian and international awards. Notable also is the production credit for Walter Salles. Machado’s direction is dizzying, uncompromising and glittering in a seedy, nightcrawling way that suits this tale perfectly. Close-up camerawork captures the emotional and physical intimacy without lasciviousness or prudery. It’ll come as no surprise to cinema brasileiro fans that his co-writer was the peerless Karim Aïnouz – it has his narrative and stylistic fingerprints all over it.
In the middle of such a world, this trio are inexorably entwined with each other; as the two young men’s shared obsession threatens to devour their lifelong loyalty to each other, Karina is equal parts enthralled and horrified by the chaos that orbits her. Is it love, pride co-dependence? (A question Moura would revisit in later life in Dope Thief, with a similar theme of childhood friends from the wrong side of the tracks who can do each other no good). In the end, I’m not sure the characters themselves know. Tragically, these three can neither escape their reality nor each other.
