Review of Bus 174 (2002) by Jennifer M — 08 Jun 2009

This is an absolutely brutal film--the kind you admire and then never watch again. It's also entirely infuriating, but it's safe to say, I think, that is one of the emotional responses the filmmakers are aiming for. The circumstances of this event, in retrospect, are a horrible shame for the Brazilian government and its police force. The egregious mishandling of this hijacking/kidnapping made me want to scream at my computer while watching the film. I don't normally feel compelled to yell at screens (with Michigan football games a glaring exception), but the bureaucratic incompetence excruciatingly detailed here will make your skin crawl. I also haven't wanted to see someone literally shot in a movie this much, or at all, since I first saw "Saving Private Ryan." In that case, my response was in compliance with Spielberg's dubious manipulation of his audience's emotions; in the case of "Bus 174," though, it seems to emerge more organically out of the colossal stupidity on display. You simply cannot believe the cops didn't take this guy down until the absolute worst moment, and in the most inefficient--and ultimately tragic--manner.

The filmmakers do an admirable job of demonstrating how the perpetrator of the crime in question didn't have much of a chance in life. Born into extreme poverty, orphaned in the most painful way imaginable, and relegated to a life of petty crime, drug addiction, and vicious social exclusion. However, in so carefully and polemically refuting the kind of reactionary claims of the dominant ideology about the "nature" of crime and criminals, the film missteps, I believe, in its treatment of the other major victim of this horrible day. We learn next to nothing about the innocent bystander whose life ended too soon, at the hands of an oblivious and selfish government. It feels as if the filmmakers didn't know how to handle her story without the obvious hook of recounting a life of hardship. Surely, in life and death, she deserved better then the treatment she receives here, which makes her seem like a footnote in an historical event.