Summary:
Based around the search for a father by a child who has never met him, Central do Brasil tells a simple story, ‘yet one that is full of nuances and resonances’ (Ruffinelli 2000: 690). The film relates two main quests: one by a boy, Josué, searching in the heart of Brazil for a father he longs for; and the other by a cold-hearted, emotionally deprived woman, Dora, (unconsciously) searching for her capacity for compassion. A retired teacher, Dora scrapes a living by writing letters for illiterate customers passing through Rio de Janeiro’s largest train station. One day, a young mother, Ana, asks her to write a letter to the estranged father of her nine year-old son Josué. Immediately after leaving the station, Ana is hit by a bus and dies. In an unusual act of compassion, Dora, who often destroys the letters she gets paid to mail, overcomes the initial temptation to make a profit off the boy, now a homeless orphan, by trafficking him to a corrupt couple. Eventually, she decides to take Josué to his father, who lives in Brazil’s distant North-East.
Analysis:
As Dora and Josué traverse the country, Central do Brasil presents the theme of the journey as a metaphor for personal and political metamorphosis and as a national allegory. The film can therefore be read as a story about the recuperation of self-identity as well as of Brazil’s national identity. Given the striking similarity in Portuguese between the words pai (father) and país (country), the search for the boy’s father becomes a search for Brazil’s roots. According to Walter Salles, the odyssey Dora and Josué embark on is a quest for their personal identities and is emblematic of a nation, Brazil, that is suffering a profound identity crisis at the turn of the twenty-first century and trying to redefine its future and to find its origins. Writing in 1999, Salles states that the starting point of Central do Brasil was the culture of ‘cynicism and indifference’ of the last 30 years of Brazilian political and social history. The film foregrounds the possibility of redemption for the country and, therefore, the possibility of a different future for a more compassionate and humane Brazil:
“The story came to me in a block. and the characters were already emblematic of a larger situation. Dora represents old Brazil: that culture of indifference and cynicism we had in the 1970s and 1980s, which arose from the idea that we had to become industrialised and any means were acceptable to reach specific ends. The character of the boy is exactly the opposite: he represents the possibility of certain innocence, of refusing a deterministic future and granting yourself another destiny. But he also has to do with a collective desire in Brazil today for a change.” (cited in James 1999:14)
It could be suggested that the characters’ journey, in that it is a journey towards the sertão (the land ‘at the end of the world’, heart of the most impoverished part of Brazil), also stands for the need for Salles as a Brazilian filmmaker to search for, and reunite with, his cinematic precursor – the politically motivated Cinema Nôvo, the avant-garde movement that revolutionised Brazilian film aesthetics in the 1960s, and in which the sertão came to be a privileged cinematic location. Combining national history, myth and popular culture with images of the reality of scarcity and deprivation, and the suffering and brutality experienced by the poor and dispossessed living in the interior of Brazil at the time, Cinema Nôvo contributed to the forging of a narrative of national belonging and a sense of shared collective experience. The movement was silenced by the early 1970s by the authoritarian government of the time, because in depicting a side of Brazil that the elite liked to ignore and made invisible, it was critical of the military regime that had been ruling the country since 1964 (Hayward 2000: 55–7).
Central do Brasil starts at the largest train station in Rio de Janeiro. Here we meet Dora – a callous woman who shows no sign of ethical or moral principles and is insensitive to the concerns of others. Through her we encounter a socially marginalised Brazil that could not be more distant from the image created by national television and the media in general, which have played a key role in controlling and defining Brazil’s recent past (Salles 1999: vi). The young and old illiterate customers at Dora’s stall represent immigrants from the impoverished North-East of Brazil. As they try to keep in touch with their relatives and friends, they also strive to maintain contact with their past and their roots. According to Stephen M. Hart, Dora’s job as a letter writer (as well as her former job as a school teacher) acts as a metaphor for ‘the lettered city’ which exploits the provinces of Brazil. When she cynically destroys her customers’ letters, Dora denies those without a voice the chance to make themselves heard. In doing so, she stands for the literate urban white elite who exert material and symbolic power over the rest of Brazil through literacy and education (2004: 184). To reinforce the impression that Dora and the Brazil she represents are trapped in a situation from which escape is impossible, the first part of the film depicts a claustrophobic world with no horizons or skies in sight. While the narrative unfolds in the monochrome urban landscape, a sense of imprisonment is created by the use of closed lenses and by the settings: the station and its constantly moving crowds, indifferent to what is happening around them; the dull façades of the external locations, such as the building where Dora lives; and Dora’s cramped apartment overlooking the train tracks (Salles 1999: vii–viii).
Among those whom Dora denies the chance to be heard is Josué. His desire to find the home and the father he has never seen speaks of his willingness to challenge a predetermined destiny as a meninˇo de rua, a homeless street kid, and to take matters into his own hands, so granting himself (and, in turn, Dora) another chance. Dora’s chance encounter with the symbolic figure of innocence represented by Josué – ‘the moral reservoir that can still generate compassion’ (Xavier, cited in Nagib 2003: xxi) – triggers her redemption and sets the journey of self-(re)discovery in motion. When on the road, Dora’s horizons open up, literally and metaphorically. The further behind she leaves the gloomy monochrome of the urban landscape, the more she is changed by the places she traverses and the people she meets on the journey. This is visually reinforced by the gradual introduction of new colours. According to Lisa Shaw, the colours which become increasingly visible on the journey stand for Dora’s clearer view of the world, while the blue skies of the open road, contrasting the dreary shades of the station hallway, stand for the hope that the journey brings (2003: 170). The transition between the world Dora and Josué are leaving behind and the new one they are entering is emphasised, in Salles’s words, ‘by the ochre hues of the drought-stricken land of the North-East’ (1999: viii) – the rural scenery of the sertão, the other side of modern and industrial Brazil.
As Ivana Bentes (2003) has observed, if the city is a claustrophobic place of alienation with no ethical or moral values, Salles’ sertão is presented as a friendly place where people still care for each other: an idealised, innocent, pure and benevolent place that values friendship and memory and that, although neglected by official politics and hit by poverty, is peaceful. In this respect, the film seems to depart from the depiction of the sertão as a violent and desperate rural area that was at the heart of the early Cinema Nôvo in order to suggest the idea of an ‘uncorrupted’ Brazil, where human values, such as dignity and solidarity, can still be found.
Central do Brasil offers the romantic sertão, the idealised return to the ‘origins’. Its aesthetic realism, with citations of Cinema Nôvo, offers a utopian wager like a fable. The sertão emerges as a projection of lost dignity and as the promised land of a reversed exodus from the seaside to the interior, a return of the failed and disinherited who were unable to survive in the big city. It is not a desired or politicised, but an emotional return led by circumstances. Thus the sertão becomes a land of social reconciliation and pacification (2003: 126).
It is the sertão that provides the dramatic backdrop for Dora’s final transformation. According to Fernão Pessoa Ramos, Dora is eventually cleansed of her moral squalor and cynicism during the procession sequence. As she physically plunges into the crowd, she also immerses herself into the popular faith in a moment of profound spiritual and cultural communion with the locals. The ecstasy she experiences during the procession is the cathartic moment of her moral redemption (2003: 68). Having completed her spiritual journey, Dora awakes in the main square of Bom Jesus, with her head on Josué’s lap. The boy strokes her hair while she (self-reassuringly) pats his knees. Their initially troubled relationship has evolved towards solidarity, companionship and love as they have moved towards the rural landscape. And it is Josué who protects Dora, in a poignant image that seems to imply that ‘the deep scars left by the social ills of the recent past might somehow be survived and surmounted by a creative union of the old and the new Brazils’ (McCarthy 1998: 72). The image powerfully encapsulates the final message of the film regarding Brazilian identity in contemporary times. Central do Brasil depicts a society going through a phase of transition. Eventually facing the devastating effects of a neo-liberal culture of modernisation at all costs that has led to cynicism and indifference, alienation, and a lack of communication and integration among its different social and ethnic groups, Brazil is a country that reveals a craving for a change, an urge to overcome the mistakes of its recent past and redeem itself. The film seems to suggest that salvation is possible, and that the road to redemption passes through a rediscovery and revaluation of the importance of memory and of the country’s roots, in a process that involves acknowledgment of the importance of difference and individuality, identification, solidarity and reconciliation with the ‘Other within’. Dramatising the nation’s contemporary reality, fears, anxieties and aspirations, the film seems to encourage different and often antagonistic groups of people within Brazilian society to see themselves as a singular body sharing common roots. In doing so, Central do Brasil contributes to the formation of imaginary yet strong bonds which can help hold Brazilian people together as a community.
Antonella Palmieri
Cast and Crew:
[Country: Brazil, France. Production Company: Arthur Cohn/MACT Productions/Videofilms/Riofilme/Canal Plus. Producers: Arthur Cohn, Martine De Clermont-Tonnerre. Director: Walter Salles. Screenwriters: João Emanuel Carneiro, Marcos Bernstein (based on an original idea by Walter Salles). Cinematographer: Walter Carvalho. Editors: Isabelle Rathery, Felipe Lacerda. Cast: Fernanda Montenegro (Dora), Vinícius De Oliveira (Josué), Soia Lira (Ana), Marília Pêra (Irene).]
Further Reading:
Ivana Bentes, ‘The Sertão and the Favela in Contemporary Brazilian films’, in Lúcia Nagib (ed.), The New Brazilian Cinema, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2003, pp. 121–38.
Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw, Popular Cinema in Brazil: 1930–2001, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004.
Stephen M. Hart, A Companion to Latin American Film, Woodbridge, Tamesis, 2004.
Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, London & New York, Routledge, 2000.
Nick James, ‘Heartbreak and Miracles’, in Sight and Sound, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1999, pp. 13–15.
Todd McCarthy, ‘Central Station’, in Variety, Vol. 369, No. 13, 1998, pp. 70–2.
Lúcia Nagib, Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema and Utopia, London & New York, I.B. Tauris, 2007.
Fernão Pessoa Ramos, ‘Humility, Guilt and Narcissism Turned Inside Out in Brazil’s Film Revival’, in Lúcia Nagib (ed.), The New Brazilian Cinema, London & New York, I.B. Tauris, 2003, pp. 65–84.
Jorge Ruffinelli, ‘Brazil 2001 and Walter Salles: Cinema for the Global Village?’ in Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, Spring/Fall 2000, pp. 681–96.
Walter Salles, ‘Introduction’, in Emanuel Carneiro and Marcos Bernstein, Central Station: The Screenplay, London, Bloomsbury, 1999.
Deborah Shaw, Contemporary Cinema of Latin America: Ten Key Films, New York and London, Continuum, 2003.
Ismail Xavier, ‘Brazilian Cinema in the 1990s: The Unexpected Encounter and the Resentful Character’, in Lúcia Nagib (ed.), The New Brazilian Cinema, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2003, pp. 39–64.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.