THE ELITE SQUAD: The 2008 Berlin Film Festival’s Controversial Winner
by Andre Soares
The second Brazilian production to win the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear, José Padilha’s Tropa de Elite / The Elite Squad, a violent tale about Rio’s special police unit’s fight against slum-based druglords, was a controversial choice for the 2008 festival’s top award. Unlike the previous Brazilian winning entry, the considerably cozier Central Station back in 1998, The Elite Squad was greeted with strong reservations in certain quarters both in Brazil and elsewhere.
"The Elite Squad is a Hollywood movie spoken in Portuguese," wrote Plínio Fraga in the daily Folha de São Paulo. "José Padilha’s effort is Hollywoodian when it comes to both its technical proficiency, and its social and esthetic conservatism. A quick-paced narrative, solid cinematography, impeccable sound, well-directed performers, and production costs in the neighborhood of millions of reais [approximately 10 million reais, or about US$5 million] are some of the film’s qualities — which, not by chance, was [financially] assisted by producer Harvey Weinstein (ex-Miramax).
"But The Elite Squad [also] inherited from the American cinema the schematic screenplay, the mythologizing moralism, the utilitarian cynicism, the social hypocrisy, the monolithic way of thinking. It trivializes and glamorizes torture. … It’s a film that is both inhuman and authoritarian." [Fraga's full review can be read in this forum.]
In Variety, Jay Weissberg lambasted The Elite Squad for elevating Rio’s special police unit "to Rambo-style heroes," calling the film "a one-note celebration of violence-for-good that plays like a recruitment film for fascist thugs."
Padilha (right), whose similarly themed documentary Bus 174 (2002) received numerous positive reviews, asserts that his dramatic feature debut was "misunderstood" by some. That could well be, though claims in the Brazilian media that "foreigners" who didn’t like The Elite Squad failed to appreciate it because they were unable to fully comprehend its sociopolitical context are at best disingenuous. (Just take a look at Fraga’s review; more reviews can be found — via Google’s translator — here.)
"I don’t make any moral judgments," Padilha told the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, "for I’ve made a film about choices. There are nearly 40,000 military police officers in [the state of] Rio and 3 million drug users. The users don’t have a choice, but the police officers do. They make little money, they’re poorly equipped, and they risk their lives for nothing. Their choices are: to become corrupted, to do nothing, or to go to war. Each one of those is shit."
In the same article, Padilha added, "When I remember that Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now were also called fascist, then I think I’m in pretty good company."
The curious thing about the accusations that The Elite Squad is a far right-wing take on Brazil’s myriad social problems is that the president of this year’s Berlin jury was none other than Costa-Gavras, a talent hardly known for espousing right-wing views. The Greek-born director of Z, State of Siege, and Missing remarked that The Elite Squad was the six-person jury’s unanimous choice.
After receiving the Golden Bear, Padilha told The Hollywood Reporter that the award was "for everybody who worked on this film and also for the Brazilian audience who elected this movie with their underground movement to watch it and pass it on. They are sending a clear message that they want the police corruption to stop. They want the violence to stop. This film won’t do that but I have hope they [sic] people in Brazil will do it."
Also at the festival, the director declared that he wanted "European countries to help us open the debate on the hypocrisy surrounding the issue of drug trafficking, [and] to try to help us legalize drug use, something that would prevent millions of people from continuing to die."
Based on anthropologist Luiz Eduardo Soares, and former special unit officers Rodrigo Pimentel and André Batista’s book Elite da Tropa ("The Squad’s Elite"), The Elite Squad, co-adapted by Padilha, Pimentel, and City of God co-writer Bráulio Mantovani, and starring Wagner Moura (whose character’s catchphrase is "war is war"; see top photo), became a cause célèbre in Brazil after pirated copies — I’m assuming that’s the "underground movement" Padilha mentions above — were watched by an estimated 1 million people long before the film hit Brazilian screens. (Some sources claim that approximately 11 million Brazilians have watched the pirated version, which was taken from a print stolen before post-production work on the film had been completed. Another 2.5 million Brazilians saw it at movie theaters.)
By the way, The Elite Squad wasn’t Brazil’s entry for the 2008 best foreign-language film Academy Award. Since the Academy’s foreign-language film voters opted not to pick Fernando Meirelles‘ ultra-violent and much praised (or rather, way overpraised slumxploitation trash) City of God in 2002, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture opted to submit Cao Hamburger’s much more Academy-friendly The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, the story of a street-alone little boy who is befriended by an elderly Jewish man in the São Paulo of the 1970s. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (also co-written by Bráulio Mantovani) was one of the nine semi-finalists in the foreign-language film category, but failed to make the final cut.
Next February 27, the Elite Squad DVD will be officially released in Brazil, where Padilha’s film is also scheduled to become a TV series. It will open in the United States (via The Weinstein Co.) in the summer.
Now, since we’re talking about Harvey Weinstein, look for The Elite Squad at next year’s Oscar nominations list. In fact, according to reports, Weinstein himself pressured Berlin festival organizers to include The Elite Squad in its main competition section after the film had been chosen to screen in the Panorama sidebar.
Ah, Rio’s Secretary of Security, who apparently gets Brazilian reality mixed up with Brazilian soaps, claims that the murderous violence committed by Rio’s "elite squad" takes place only at the movies. Amnesty International thinks otherwise.
Photos: David Prichard/TWC
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Well, i hope this is better than City of God. Seems like it’ll also be much more violent.