Central Do Brasil, Walter Salles, 1997

Central Do Brasil, Walter Salles, 1997

How may films, this writer wonders, use a road incident of some kind as the catalytic event with which to propel their story’s plot? A fair few perhaps, but in the case of Walter Salles’s Central Do Brasil it is an entirely justified machination. Rio’s grandiose and hectic (aren’t they all?) train station is the eponymous starting point for this fable of modern day Brazil. In fact, the station at the heart of the country’s most prosperous city is the point of departure for all the venal and arterial roads, railways and paths upon which the two protagonists set out on their enforced journey.

Dora is a goggle-eyed, middle-aged, cantankerous former school teacher who has long since had her joie de vivre purged from her soul, now making ends meet by means of a letter writing stall at the station for Rio’s reams of illiterates. Josué is a sharp-eyed 9 year old, orphaned in the afore-mentioned road incident. Spry and directly inquisitive, it is his search for his errant father into southern Brazil that becomes the film’s central path. Thus, it is something of an “apprentissage” for both Josué and Dora who both arrive at very different points mentally and physically by the film’s close.

Salles is evidently keen on painting a picture of modern day Brazil in its truest form. Father figures are absent or reluctant to grasp the nettle of responsibility, symbols of the country’s religious fascinations abound (Josué’s own pater familias is named – in no uncertain terms – Jesus…”Does Jesus live here?” Is an oft-repeated question within the film) and yet religion seems only to be a means for the nation to shirk responsibility again in the face of the world’s indiscriminate cruelties. There is lawlessness on the streets, petty thieves are shot dead by everyday stall owners as penance and Josué almost falls victim to a black-market of body organ trading. In this way, there is no melodramatic or unnecessarily rose-tinting of Brazil’s reality for Salles, though he clearly loves his country, in all its glories and pitfalls, very deeply indeed. There is a profound humanism at work here which imbues this film with a genuinely uplifting backbeat by the end.

Salles probably sees a failure of communication as integral to the county’s wider failures, and yet beyond that he also clearly sees hope and possibility. You could do far worse than treat Central Do Brasil as documentarial evidence of the beauty and variety within the country. Sparse, barren landscapes and dusty red roads form the tissue in the south between the bustling chaos of Rio and the newly constructed grid towns and their freshly paved roads, where Josué locates his brothers. There is definitely something akin to the feeling of the Italian neo-realists here and perhaps also to the magic realism of post WW1 glories like Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Leve. There is indeed a great white light ahead in the dawn for Brazil, its culture, and surely this talented, confident director.