I f you are into a nice and safe Hollywood style of film like ¨City of God¨were poverty is cool, with cosmopolitan bourgeois actors like Seu Jorge, and there is in the end a happy ending (not to mention social commentary 25 plus years after the said incident...pretty cowardly), then please do not watch Rodrigo D: No Futuro. Mature ten, perhaps twenty years and see it then. The title of the film precedes what one should expect of the structure in the film....¨no future¨. There is no concept of time in this film which is why it is filmed in an aimless manner. ¨Pulp Fiction¨came out in 1994 and it was championed because it disturbed a traditional notion of time, BUT ¨Rodrigo D¨came out in 1990 (1988, in fact but released in 1990) and the conception of time or better said timelessness in the film is by far much more important than that of ¨Pulp Fiction¨. What is of key importance in the film is the final scenes when one is led to believe that the protagonist Rodrigo has committed suicide and then time is cut back, so we think or are made to question, to a scene that we think already happened: the murder of a punk by three bored street kids. The murder of the punk is presented in this ¨cut-back¨from the point of view of the victim where, after being shot what he (we) see is a body dangling in the trees, going no-where. We do not know if it is alive or dead, we can only assume that it is Rodrigo D's body just there, as if without a past and stagnant and, therefore, with no future. This movie is not glamorous, which is what makes it what it is. There are no John Travoltas. All of the actors were real street kids; Gaviria erases here the line between documentary and fiction and throws out the window the notion of the script, literally (rodigo jumps, remember). And this film as i mentioned above is not cowardly like¨City of God¨. It was filmed in the actual neighborhood where it is supposed to take place and not in some studio made to look like a beautiful Brazilian favela. The kids in the movie lived in this neighborhood and unfortunately due too their screen exposure four, to my knowledge, were singled out for execution for participating in social commentary of the present time. They were killed before reaching the age of 20 for being in this film. This movie really anticipates the acclaimed American film ¨Kids¨by Larry Clark except, again, the film ¨kids¨used actors who wanted to be mainstream actors, probably of the middle classes. ¨City of God¨ takes place 30 some years prior to the film's release, typical of the Hollywood political rule. Lastly, if it should be compared then at least in attitude it should be compared to ¨repo man¨, not because ¨repo man¨is as important but because both contain a certain aspects of Punk (when punk had just died) which is practically impossible to depict to-day. As for Punks who were swastikas, try Sid Vicious, New Order, and Joy Division. The taking of a fascist symbol and twisting its meaning by wearing it in degrading form just too annoy the REAL Fascist AT HEART was a punk specialty.
do your homework.
do your homework.