6/7/2023 0 Comments Last stop 174![]() Likewise, the films gets credibility from its locations in gridlocked streets and around Rio’s main cathedral (where the real high-jacker survived a police massacre of sleeping street kids in 1993). The dialogue in his tale of a mother’s search for her son among young street thugs is not eloquent, but it hits you with a visceral poignancy. Mantovani’s script (despite occasional obvious turns) is infused with a fatalism that presumes Rio’s sociology - rich and poor live in close proximity and crime is the sole livelihood for abandoned street kids. Even at a high emotional volume, he steers his actors clear of the melodramatic revenge-orgies of Elite Squad, which unfolded in the same territory. The bus highjacking erupts as a desperate inevitable crescendo.īarreto’s direction of the story whose ending we know avoids the predictable hand-held ‘documentary’ style and the inflated gestures of City of God, opting for the look of an American urban crime drama of the 1970’s, seasoned with neo-realism. ![]() Doubting that he’s the real son, the shrewd boy plays along, yet family life with Marisa can’t compete with the allure of crime, an obsession with a sexy street-kid turned prostitute (Gabriela Luiz), and ever-present drugs. Marisa, off drugs and born-again, thinks her prayers have been answered when she finds Sandro in jail. The story cuts to another child ten years later, Sandro, who finds his mother stabbed to death in a robbery.īoth teenaged boys (Michel Gomes and Marcelo Mello, Jr.) end up in the street and in prison, and back on the streets. Home video could be strong with the growing public that is responding to Brazilian cinema.Įnding with the well-known highjacking, Last Stop 174 begins in Rio’s hillside slums, where a drug dealer rips three month old Alessandro from the arms of his coke addict mother, Marisa (Cris Vianna). Attractive young actors should also help the film with the youth market. The absence of much of a score (although Marcelo Zavos is credited) may be an effort to avoid cliches of Brazilian ‘exoticism’, but it’s a drawback to promoting the picture internationally.Ī lean unsentimental script by Braulio Mantovani (who wrote City of God) and tactile camera-work by DP Antoine Heberle make interwoven stories easy to follow in pictures alone - subtitles are barely needed. Yet Last Stop 174 brings no recognizable stars to its cast, only Barreto’s directorial reputation in his 18th feature. The melodrama about a street thug lost to family and society rounds out familiar contours with solid acting, mostly from young non-professionals.īrazilian urban violence won’t be new to any audience familiar with the City of God or Elite Squad (Jose Padilha’s feature debut about street crime from the police perspective). ![]() But Sandro's scars run deeper than Marisa could ever imagine, so deep that he believes his only hope for survival is taking a busload of hostages.Bruno Barreto’s dramatization of the June 2000 bus highjacking in Rio de Janeiro, which was the subject of Jose Padilha’s probing 2002 documentary Bus 174, rises above standard docu-drama fare. When Marisa arrives at the centre in search of her son, she mistakes Sandro for Alessandro and tenderly takes the troubled boy under her wing. Later, Sandro somehow manages to survive the notorious Candelaria massacre, only to be locked away in a juvenile detention centre. Wistfully recalling his mother's promises to take him to Copacabana, the grieving boy runs away, ultimately falling in with a group of street kids and becoming addicted to drugs. Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Rio, a young boy named Sandro wanders into his mother's shop to find her lifeless body riddled with knife wounds. Later, after becoming sober, Marisa becomes obsessed with finding her son and begins searching the local juvenile detention homes. Marisa (Cris Vianna) is a drug addict whose baby, Alessandro, was taken from her by drug dealers after she failed to pay a lingering debt. The tragic events that informed Jose Padilha's 2003 documentary BUS 174 serve as the inspiration for this docudrama detailing the events that unfolded when, on the morning of June 12, 2000, the passengers on a bus traveling through the wealthy Rio de Janeiro district of Jardim BotΓnico were taken hostage by a disturbed young man who had been abandoned by society.
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