Elite Squad 2 Opens in the UK, Guardian Writes on the Film’s Social Investigaion
August 28, 2011 Leave a comment
Elite Squad 2: A Social Investigation
As Elite Squad 2 opens in the UK, the Guardian has a great column on the role of the “Favela Film” in Brazil and beyond.
When Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite), José Padilha’s film about Rio de Janeiro’s infamous military-police unit, BOPE, was released in 2007 the director found himself under siege. Many critics found its full-frontal assault on the issue of favela violence – baldly narrated by the trigger-happy Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) – too much to take. Varietydubbed it “a one-note celebration of violence-for-good”, while Brazilian film critic Marcelo Janot said: “It’s really dangerous when a film suggests that the fascist BOPE methods are the only solution to ‘clean’ a city.
They’d probably take the dim view of Padilha’s decision to make a sequel, with Nascimento, the Brazilian Dirty Harry, picking up where he left off: crouched behind a car under a storm of gunfire. It’s the same American-style action dynamic at front of house, and behind it, an attempt at Hollywood business acumen – a proper franchise with its very own colonically irrigated title, Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within. And it paid off handsomely, breaking a 35-year-standing record to become Brazil’s most popular homegrown film ever, both in terms of admissions (11.3m) and box office ($63m).
In answer to the accusations against the first Elite Squad, Padilha pointed out (to Demetrios Matheou in the excellent Faber Book of New South American Cinema that there was a precedent for the critics’ kneejerk reaction: “I don’t know if people remember that when City of God was released in Brazil, it was accused of glorifying drug dealers,” he said. “What’s happened with me is exactly the same thing that happened with Fernando [Meirelles], which was the critics jumped down his throat. This is the one thing the two movies have in common. There is a film ideology that says films about social issues should give the audience critical distance, in order to evaluate what’s going on … I think the great thing Fernando did was say, ‘Let’s make a movie that has social content, but it’s gonna grab you by the balls.’ It’s gonna be emotive, and we’re going to run with it and you won’t have time to think while it goes on … You can think when the film is over.” They were both, in other words, walking the same fine line, blending urgent social comment with the slick air of commercial entertainment that is the Hollywood stock-in-trade: Meirelles’s film inherited the Goodfellas swagger, while Elite Squad was the offspring of numerous nu-metal-scored butt-kickers.
Both attracted attention in the west (City of God took Cannes 2002 by storm, Elite Squad won Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2008) because of their commerciality, but it’s impossible to overstate how important the emphasis on social commentary is. It’s a key characteristic of the noughties Latin American film-making boom and it’s exactly this kind of contentious material that would get focus-grouped out of most films under the US studio system. Over the last decade Brazil’s commercial cinema has made a virtue of systematically auditing the deprivation, violence and bribery that’s under discussion daily in the country.
Padilha isn’t franchise-building so much as sustaining a programme of social investigation (doubly so in his case: he also made the magnificent hijack documentary Bus 174. In step with its greying protagonist, The Enemy Within is more mature; a political, rather than an action, thriller. There’s no question this time of fascistic leanings: the jibes at hypocritical dope-scoring liberals have been replaced with clean admiration for the film’s one leftwing figure, Fraga (Irandhir Santos), based on Marcelo Freixo, an actual MP who headed a parliamentary commission on militias in the favelas (and consulted on the film). There are other real-life counterparts, too: Fortunato (André Mattos), the rightwing shock jock involved in a conspiracy to exploit the slum-dwellers, apparently apes the camera-hogging histrionics of Wagner Montes, a well-known TV presenter.
Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within (Tropa De Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora E Outro)
- Production year: 2010
- Country: Rest of the world
- Runtime: 117 mins
- Directors: Jose Padilha
- Cast: Andre Ramiro, Irandhir Santos, Milhem Cortaz, Wagner Moura
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