Ready to Rent Ready to Rent (July 30, 2004)

Bus 174

Hart Sharp Video VHS & DVD

2 hrs

Directors: José Padilha, Felipe Lacerda

José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda's "Bus 174" is one of the most devastating documentaries I have seen in a very long time. Like the equally excellent "City of God," "Bus 174" is about poverty in paradise and the embarrassing social strata that have formed beneath the dream that is Rio de Janeiro. In some ways both films are alike, with horrid poverty as the epicenter, which adjoins them through the space they share. It is also one of the most wonderfully constructed documentaries that I have seen, with its social agenda not getting in the way of the story but flowering from the carnivorous streets it portrays, so its textured background is always there, always waiting to bite.

The story is one of the desperation that stems from such conditions. On June 12, 2000, a young man, Sandro do Nascimento, walked onto Rio Bus 174 both high and armed, and proceeded to take the bus and its passengers hostage. The police were quickly called and Sandro, now stressed and paranoid, flailed wildly and called demands to the police, who promised to not harm him as long as he turned the hostages over. It is in these choices that Padilha and Lacerda flush out the tragic reasons for the drama that the audience experiences. They start with Sandro's horrid childhood, filled with the tragedies of a ghetto lifestyle that include a fatherless household, ignorance and violence. With no one to guide Sandro, the directors argue, he became an immature, paranoid man, whose only impressions of the world are the deep economic ones, juxtaposed with a mansion on one corner and the slum across from it. It seems, however, that it is the brutality of the police and the prison system that destroyed Sandro's integrity. The directors illustrate this with their clandestine footage of the prison where Sandro was once sentenced, which is one of the worst in Brazil, with desperate prisoners who call out to the camera saying they have been tortured, humiliated or their parole has simply been forgotten.

I cannot tell you how the story ends, but it is truly the most tense and insidious corruption of any working legal and moral system I have ever seen put to film, with nothing but a feeling of exhaustion and sadness to comfort the viewer at the end. "Bus 174" does not excuse Sandro, but it does show the limited options that were offered to him from his environment. It does touch on one fascinating topic, political in nature, where Sandro cries for the end of oppression from the police while he rants for those six hours. He would give himself up, but he was afraid of the police's brutal anger because he lashed out at them. Padilha and Lacerda transcend the material at this point and do not frame Sandro as a martyr, but as a tragic example of a majority of people who are subjected to capitalistic oppression and whose only comforts are the TV, where all watched Sandro play out his final moments. -Joe Ramirez

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