PIXOTE Movie Review

Director Hector Babenco's wrenching portrait of an orphaned boy's nightmarish existence on the crime-ridden streets of Sao Paolo, Brazil, is one of the most grueling, powerful, and disturbing films of the last quarter-century. Pixote has justly been compared to Luis Buñuel's great Los Olvidados, yet there has perhaps never been a vision of childhood on screen as thoroughly horrifying as Babenco's. This 10-year-old's descent into the lowest level of hell is presented in a series of what seem like inevitable moments, all leading with inexorable and terrifying logic to the creation of a little murderer. Pixote isn't the kind of “social problem” movie we're used to, in which a cliche of a caseworker will manage to turn around one child and show everybody what's wrong with the state's methods for dealing with juvenile crime; in these teeming slums of Sao Paolo, to paraphrase Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, there are no methods at all. At the time the film was made, more than half the city's population was under 18. Fernando Ramos da Silva, a non-professional actor and a young orphan himself, gives an amazing, chilling performance as Pixote. But perhaps calling it a performance isn't fully accurate: a few years after Pixote’s release, young da Silva died in those same streets, during a shootout with police. The film is genuinely great, but the experience of watching it is so devastating that one recommends it to others with caution. From the novel Infancia dos Mortos by Jose Louzeiro.

NEXT STOP … Los Olvidados, The Bicycle Thief, River's Edge (1986)

1981 127m/C BR Fernando Ramos Da Silva, Marilia Pera, Jorge Juliao, Gilberto Moura, Jose Nilson dos Santos, Edilson Lino; D: Hector Babenco; W: Hector Babenco; M: John Neschling. Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards ‘81: Best Foreign Film; New York Film Critics Awards ‘81: Best Foreign Film; National Society of Film Critics Awards ‘81: Best Actress (Pera). VHS FCT, COL