Brazil
4*
Director:
José Padilha
Screenwriters:
José Padilha
Rodrigo Pimentel
Bráulio Mantovani
Director of Photography:
Lula Carvalho
Running time: 113 minutes
Original title: Tropa de elite
In a city like Rio de Janeiro, whose police force “protects the corrupt”, especially when the corrupt is one of their own, an incorruptible force of guardians is essential: in this case, such individuals have formed an elite group, trained more aggressively than the Israeli army, that performs the function of watchmen, and it is no coincidence that Foucault is discussed in a sociology class attended by Matias, a talented policeman who will be trained as a member of this “Elite Squad”, or BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais).
In the first scene, Matias and Neto – another policeman and a friend since childhood – are singled out as possible replacements for Captain Nascimento, a member of BOPE whose life has been turned upside down by his continued involvement in their operations; his personal life (he is about to become a father) is straining under the pressure of his life as a special forces policeman and he needs to get out.
BOPE is hardcore and they are physically and mentally as tough as they come, but while these guys can track down and punish the most devious of slum lords, they are clearly filled with rage and the film hints at some of the reasons. There is frustration amongst the most law-abiding policemen that everybody is not fully held accountable, that it is too slow or that it is not strict enough. Some of the policemen see their colleagues turn their job into a way to earn extra money by using their position as a way to extort ordinary individuals – by promising them special protections, for example – and this game with the law has ominous potential: “Those who get paid to uphold the law can also get paid to cut it loose.”
At the centre of developments is an upcoming visit by Pope John Paul II (the film is set in 1997) to Rio de Janeiro: His Holiness decided to stay at the favela of Turano, a notorious slum, so that he can be closer to the poor and destitute, and it is up to the BOPE to ensure that the Holy Father will lose no sleep over his safety in such a poor, crime-ridden area of the city. But the preparations for the visit take a backseat to the stories of Matias and Neto, respectively the brains and the heart necessary to make a good BOPE agent, and the challenge Nascimento faces in deciding who would replace him.
Some of the film’s action scenes are quite shocking – not because of the brutal violence they depict, but because the characters committing these acts are often policemen themselves, who are supposed to uphold the law. In one sequence of events, the endemic corruption on the force is treated with some comedy, as heads butt and we see how quickly chaos can erupt in an environment where bribery is a normal part of the job of being a policeman. But the rest of Elite Squad shows a much darker side of the Rio police: portrayed as a bunch of reckless hooligans, more or less kept in check by the cream that is the BOPE, the latter can also act like barbarians in the name of keeping order – at one point they prepare to torture an informant by raping him with a broom.
One should be able to get a clearer picture of the two sides that provide the Rio crime scene with such tension. We are informed that peace in Rio “depends on a delicate balance between the ammunition of the scum and the corruption of the cops,” but the film tries its darndest to show that the police’s brutal tactics may be mitigated by the fact that they are ultimately making the city a better place. However, the film doesn’t come close to equalling Fernando Meirelles’s City of God, a film that still ranks as one of the best favela pictures ever made. It always seems like we get an outsider’s point of view of the slums.
Elite Squad is well-made, and both Matias and Nascimento have stories that the viewer wants to follow through with, but the constant voice-over becomes boring, despite its overload of well-formulated bits of information and the apparent (though strictly illogical) omnipresence of its narrator. Followed by Elite Squad: The Enemy Within.