Walter Salles’ Central Station is the kind of film that I instinctively respond to. It defies traditional genre classification. On one hand, it is a story about two lost, lonely people who discover in each other a second chance for life. On the other, it is a road movie about a quest for something that they realize might not actually exist. It is a character study. It is a journey. It is even a kind of travelogue through Northeast Brazil in the final throes of the 20th century. It all begins when Dora, a retired schoolteacher, meets Josué, a young boy who is tragically orphaned when his mother is hit by a bus. Dora is old and bitter, Josué is young and defiant. And yet, they form a bond that manages to penetrate the shields they have erected against other people. Dora decides to take Josué to the Northeast of Brazil in the vain hope of finding his father. I was struck by Salles’ brutal honesty in his portrayal of Brazilian society. On the one hand, it is unspeakably cruel. At a train station in Rio, Dora watches as a young teenage thief is summarily executed on the spot by the police. Before they travel to the Northeast, Dora has to rescue Josué from two criminals posing as adoption agents who harvest young children for organs. What’s more, I’m pretty sure that she doesn’t report their identities to the police afterwards. Is police corruption so rampant in Brazil that it is just assumed that telling them about such crimes is useless? But Salles also finds great beauty in the people of Brazil: an Evangelist truck-driver who gives them a lift, a flood of pious pilgrims, and the main characters, two very different people who save each other despite the fact that they know that their time together must be brief.
8/10
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