Tropa de Elite has been stored in my wanna-watch list for quite a while. I always have an issue with those ‘foreign’ films, with which I have to stare at the swift subtitles down at the bottom of the screen. It really compromises the fun of movie watching. I mean, savoring the flavor of the lines off the tongue of the actors should be an integral part of the whole thing. There are moments when I watch some French or Japanese films, I cannot help thinking the subtitle groups could be just cooking up some wild stories. With that said, luckily for me, now and then life gives me reason to overcome the language hurdle and sit myself down in front of the laptop. Be a humble illiterate for 90 mins.
So, long story short, back a while ago I bumped into a Brazilian guy who is currently teaching English in Changsha. Along with chatting around randomly about other stuff, he mentioned the movie, Tropa de Elite. “It feels more real to most Brazilians than football”, he said and I paraphrase, “but sadly my students in Changsha do not care much about Brazil besides its football”. Well I surely don’t want to upset a knowledgeable folk who traveled from the other end of the globe, and landed himself in my province, and ended up in hordes of indifferent lads.
Like what I later on told him, the movie was easy to watch. Compelling, punchy, straight and simple. No unexpected twists, nor surreal fight scenes like what you would expect from Hong Kong police genre. I should’ve speculated that it is a political movie with disguise of police element: the movie won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2009 after all. I was obscurely aware of the existence of slums in Brazil, as movies like The Fast and the Furious did all the promotion campaign. Yet I had no idea about the nuanced complexities beneath. Corrupted law enforcement, self-governing drug clans, interracial relationships … it sounds like how you would portray the society in the North America, but down here in the south in Brazil, you can tell the difference when you lay your eyes on the scenes in the movie.
The movie recounts a story about Captain Nascimento, the head of Rio's BOPE (Special Police Operations Battalion), planned to find a successor among the new fish as his child is due shortly. But that’s beside the point. What pulled my nerves was the Brazilian society it presented, the favelas for the first time I had ever caught a glimpse of. FAVELA. That’s the term for a slum in Brazil. The term was coined as an aftermath of the Canudos Campaign, in which the veteran soldiers had no choice but settle in the then Favela Hill. This was in late 1800s. Into the 20th century, especially in the 60s, massive rural population flocked into cities to join the urbanization. However urbanization was clearly not a pie that everybody could get a piece of. What made things worse was the change of Brazil’s capital from Rio to Brasilia. Employment chances dried up in Rio and jobless migrants could not afford the house in the established communities. Hence, favelas became home to generations of newcomers from countryside. When it evolved to a certain extent, it became impeccable to outsiders. In the movie, one of the drug dealers in the favela repeatedly made clear about their legitimacy: “Police are the enemies on the hill. We run things here”.
Slum is like a shadow accompanied new economies. Downtown Detroit is an extreme example of America’s de-urbanization in the 70s. With the reverse migration of middle class from urban areas to suburbs, nights of American cities are hotbeds of crimes. East End in London, where Jack the Ripper accomplished his infamy, was known as slum to immigrants, such as the French Protestant Huguenots, the Irish, and the Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. “Slumming” was even once used as a verb to describe the pastime of the British nobilities to visit the “unmade roads, unpaved courts, and lakes of putrefying night soil”.
Well, seems modern China is an exception? I am not sure whether the recklessly-expanding “urban villages”, or “villages in the city”, if you will, count as slums or not. They scatter in the outskirts and downtown segments of mega-cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Their drainage and sewerage system might be in a finer shape than slums in Rio and the then East End. But in sense of unregulated migration and social marginalization, I do not see any fundamental difference. Qin Hui, the respected Tsinghua economist said, “China’s official translation for the urban villages is squat, a lesser term than slum even.” Squat is a term for the unused land where people occupy illegally. And as I am now typing in the brisk evening of Pittsburgh, squat clearance movement probably is happening in the scorching morning of Guangzhou.
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