Pixote

Pixote (Pixote: A Lei Do Mais Fraco) (1981)

Runtime: 128 minutes

Directed by: Hector Babenco

Starring: Fernando Ramos da Silva, Jorge Juliao, Gilberto Moura, Edilson Lino, Zenildo Oliveria Santos

From: Embrafilme/HB Filmes

This is a movie I had watched once a long time ago; I finally saw it again last night and it is a picture I can give my highest recommendations to. This is the last foreign film I watch... for the month devoted to that, that is. I'll keep on seeing them at a decent frequency the other 11 months. I explain why in my Letterboxd review below:

This is the final movie I am doing in my March Around the World deal and not everything I watched was expected and I wish I could have gotten to more than 14 motion pictures, but things happened and I am still glad I saw what I did, even if some of the films weren't good. I picked this one as a mutual mentioned it on a list he created of movies that he thought deserved more attention, and this was one of them. I actually had seen this before, although it was more than a decade ago so I only remembered a few faint things about what happened; I just recalled it was great, and it is. I know that in the past I looked to see if I could stream it online as I wanted to see it again; not that long ago Amazon Instant Video added it, so I almost instantly watched the film again after all of those years.

While this is not the easiest thing to watch, I still say that this is excellent. The plot revolves around the dark, dark world of runaway children on the street of Brazil (Sao Paulo, to be specific) and we follow a few of them-including the title character-end up in a juvenile reformatory, which is a corrupt place. Even after they leave that hellhole, life is still pretty brutal for them. The gang includes the lead-who was only about 12 years old, and he does some shocking things-and a character who happened to be transgender; while I am not trans myself, the role seemed nuanced and mature instead of gross and exploitative. Unlike too many people today, her friends refer to her by the correct pronouns.

As this is an unfiltered look at that sort of lifestyle, that is why I say this is a rough watch. It's a tale with few heroes, that is for sure. Yet it is endlessly captivating as we follow these youths locked up and on the street, and both those places are not fit for those characters, even if they do things like lie, cheat, rob, stab... and worse. All of the youths are not trained actors but instead taken from the slums that this movie is set in, adding to authenticity, along with the documentary neo-realism style that it was filmed in. Besides the characters and the unforgettable story, it was filmed expertly by director Hector Babenco.

Real life makes the film even more heartbreaking. Lead Fernando Ramos da Silva is magnificent as Pixote and that's not an easy role in the least. He wasn't quite the criminal that he was here in real life but he was still from the streets and being famous wasn't easy for him. Well, at the age of 19 he was killed in an incident with police; regrettably it sounds like what happens too often in the United States, where the cops claim that they were being attacked but others claim that what they did was more akin to murder. I don't know what the case was here, but what happened to him was still pretty sad, and also what you might imagine have happened to the Pixote character.

I do agree that it is a movie which needs more attention as it likely is one of the best ever to come out of Brazil, and is just a great motion picture, even if it's the sort of thing you don't want to watch frequently. It certainly tells you how life can be down there, and amongst all the chaos going on down there I presume that the poor youths of the slums still have to lead such sad, sad lives. And that is no April Fools Day joke.