If you were impressed with Meirelles/Lund’s infamous treatment of “Cidade de Deus”, you might find yourself equally perplexed by the controversial dissection of the City’s opposite number: The “Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais” (or BOPE). The Elite Squad.
Based off of a book by the same name, penned by Brazilian anthropologist and political scientist Luiz Soares and two former BOPE captains, “Tropa” centers itself on the extreme axis of moral ambiguity and dares those willing to come and play. Though the source material has been fictionalized to some extent, censored in others because of its compromising portrayal of what only occasionally passes for law, the story is a simple one which operates in a non-linear way. Two mismatched rookie Lieutenants (the gung-ho Caio Junqueira & the naive, lawyer-aspiring Andre Ramiro), on the beat with fistfuls of bribe-gorging bad pennies, run amiss of an aging BOPE officer(Wagner Moura)looking for a replacement. Needless to say, a veritable baptism by fire ensues.
There’s a Jack Bauer style of politics at work here, folks. Only rather than a few comparatively clean, tortuous pin-pricks and a tear-filled series of babblings which result in the disclosure of a secret hideout, you get a much more graphic interpretation of the coercive process at work and the fever-pitched frenzy which rises up, out of justice or revenge, to swallow up what morals are caught in its path, until the blurred line is no longer a significant point of concern. So in short, yes, there is a hard-nosed brutality that will make the majority of viewers uncomfortable. Similarly true is how that harshness makes it hard to sympathize with almost any of the characters. But then again, maybe that’s the reality that some of us are failing to understand.
Many mainstream critics have been quick to condemn Jose Padilha’s second feature film as fascist propaganda and have concurrently labeled it a vindication for the use of terror tactics in order to achieve ‘justice’. But to interpret it as thus, I think, would be a severely shallow reading of what is trying to be accomplished here. The ugliness of what the film examines seems to have turned many off to the potential this movie shows for subversive sloganeering and has therefore blinded many to the merits of what Padilha is ultimately saying about the nature of humans under duress. An epitaph by Stanley Milgram is really all that’s needed to put those pieces together.
Now, I’ve gotten wind that the film is extremely popular in its home country. A word-of-mouth hit, it’s apparently gained the status as a kind of cult movie, one which people quote as regularly there as Tarantino is quoted here. As one of the most popular movies Brazilian history, a sequel is already in the mix for 2010. It has also been reported that a television series on Rede Globo was even being considered at one point. So when you compare that to what critics have been calling a “right-wing fantasy”, the source of that bitter distaste among classic ‘western’ values is somewhat more difficult to explain. But to be outright dismissive of the film’s apparent politics would be a bit lazy as well.
It feels no need to apologize or explain itself. Rather, it seems to expose the strong and weak points of the warring ideologies and shows us that when people get tired of a bad thing, they go to extremes. With a kind of Kubrikian passiveness, tinged with a healthy dose of iconoclasm, the movie threatens to expose the inseparability of the law and crime. This kind of cynicism is familiar. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that some of the most popular and well-received movies to come from Latin American filmmakers have been about crime, moral decay and hopelessness. “Bus 174”. “Blindness”. “City of Men”. “Children of Men”. “Amores Perros”.
We’ve grown up in a society where, for the most part, we have never known a truly deep-seated corruption. The only time we even came close to that kind of lawlessness was during the age of Capone and even then there were sorts of limits. With the exception of those choice parts of town that most people tend to sweep under the carpet, none of us today has really had to fight the fear that guys with AK’s and ski-masks are looking to collect their protection dues. Our system, though supremely imperfect, lets those of us who have the time and comfort to think about these kinds of things do just that: think. Thoughts of anarchy are only a kind of escapist fantasy we retreat into once we’ve become sick of the bureaucratic mess that we have become.
We haven’t known the kind of total failure that sucks thousands of souls out of the world each year, right below our noses, in the on-going Mexican drug war for example, which in the last year has claimed more lives than the American death toll in Iraq. And in places like Rio, the regularity of those kinds of failures is a constant reminder that the system has failed its people. And the people seem to agree that the laws of physics and equal reactions still apply once push comes to shove.
Apply when: A.) You feel like burning the world down. B.) You feel like burning the world down because you’ve been horribly wronged and nobody wants to help you make it right again. C.) You want your globe-torching desires to be conscientiously neutral and existential and hard-boiled. D.) You want all of that set to the tune of Portuguese heavy metal.
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