PIXOTE, A LEI DO MAIS FRACO
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Abstract:<BR>
One of the most wrenching cinematic experiences in history, PIXOTE
portrays the brutality in the lives of Brazil's street children.
The first half of the film depicts the blackmail and sadistic
violence faced and practiced by boys in a juvenile reformatory.  The
second half follows four boys who have escaped and become involved
in drug dealing, prostitution, and murder.
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Summary:<BR>
Argentine-born Hector Babenco (a Brazilian citizen since 1970) is
one of the most expressive filmmakers to appear in the post-Cinema
Novo generation in Brazil.  His first feature, O REI DA NOITE (1975;
THE KING OF THE NIGHT), caught the attention of critics with its
tango-flavored depiction of one man's amorous association with Sao
Paulo's nightlife.  Babenco then made one of the most controversial
Brazilian films of the 1970's, LUCIO FLAVIO (1977), the first film
to deal with the infamous death squads, their systematic use of
torture, and their mutually supportive association with Rio de
Janeiro's criminal element.  LUCIO FLAVIO, like the subsequent
PIXOTE, is based on a work of documentary fiction by Jose Louzeiro.
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LUCIO FLAVIO and PIXOTE (the original title literally means
``Peewee, the Law of the Weakest'') have a number of things in
common besides their common source.  Despite their frequent
characterization as ``documentary-like,'' both are constructed by
way of a traditional, classical, seamless narrative, the
illusionistic style long favored by Hollywood.  Both draw from
long-established international cinematic genres, LUCIO FLAVIO from
police thrillers and PIXOTE from films dealing with children and
delinquency - LES QUATRE CENTS COUPS (1959; THE 400 BLOWS), LOS
OLVIDADOS (1950).  Both concern marginal, if not criminal, elements
of Brazilian society, and both show characters in a situation with
no exit or hope.  Both films develop the metaphor of the world as a
prison.  Both deal with violence in contemporary Brazilian society
and the corruption of Brazilian social institutions, and, by
extension, function as critiques of authoritarianism itself.
Whereas LUCIO FLAVIO is filmed in what might be termed a ``realist''
style, PIXOTE, through its almost excessive use of violence, tends
toward the neonaturalist.
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PIXOTE is one of the most wrenching cinematic experiences in
history.  It portrays the brutality and violence in the lives of
Brazil's street children, most of whom, if not totally abandoned,
come from broken families.  When released in Brazil in 1980, it was
met with much controversy.  A former juvenile court judge in Rio de
Janeiro asked that the director be indicted under the Law of
National Security for inciting the corruption of minors, advocating
drug usage, and undermining social institutions.
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The film is divided into two relatively equal parts.  The first
depicts the violence faced and in some cases practiced by the boys
in Brazil's juvenile reformatories.  In the reformatory, the boys
face intimidation and blackmail from older inmates and the
authoritarian, institutional violence of the bored and often
sadistic adult ``guardians.'' In collusion with the police,
reformatory officials stand by while the children are beaten and
sometimes killed.  They virtually ignore, for example, the fact that
one boy has been violently gang raped by other boys.  The concerned
liberalism of Juiz, a juvenile court judge (Rubens de Falco), and of
the media is no match for the duplicity of the institution's
officials.  The boys became accustomed to taking drugs and are
schooled in criminal techniques.  Their few moments of relief -
Sunday afternoons with family visits or makeshift rock concerts -
are poignant for their brevity and ultimately pathetic nature.
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The second part accompanies four of the boys - Pixote (Fernando
Ramos da Silva), Dito (Gilberto Moura), Lilica (Jorge Juliao), and
Chico (Edilson Lino) - after their escape from the reformatory and
records their involvement with the criminal or marginal element of
Brazilian society. After practicing random crime in the streets of
downtown Sao Paulo, they soon meet with the drug dealer Cristal
(Tony Tornado), who wants to continue his affair with the
transvestite Lilica.  Cristal sends the group to Rio de Janeiro to
make a cocaine delivery.  There, in their naivete, they are tricked
and robbed by cabaret dancer Deborah (Elke Maravilha), whom Pixote,
in a moment of instinctive reaction, kills for her betrayal.  The
boys eventually accumulate enough stolen money to buy the rights to
pimp Sueli (Marilia Pera), an alcoholic prostitute.  With her, they
set up a plan to cheat unsuspecting clients, earning enough money to
buy a color television set by the end of long sequences of horrors
depicted in the film, Pixote has pimped, run drugs, and killed three
people, including, accidentally, his friend Dito.
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As a narrative, PIXOTE adheres rigorously to the rules of classical
cinematic discourse.  The version of the film released in the United
States begins with Babenco himself addressing the audience to
provide a background for the events depicted.  This form of direct
address, a technique more associated with documentary than with
fiction, clearly attempts to convince the spectator of the veracity
of the events that the film presents.  It posits Babenco as an
authority, lending the film a degree of authenticity that might
otherwise have been impossible.  Such an introduction was not needed
in Brazil, because the social reality which the film reconstructs is
well-known to almost anyone who has lived or worked in the country's
urban centers.
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PIXOTE functions through spectator identification with the
protagonist, which is relatively easy since the protagonist is a
child.  The process of identification is made easier still by
Babenco's choice of Fernando Ramos da Silva in the title role.  The
eloquence of his face and the agelessness of his eyes - innocent yet
hardened, childlike yet unfeeling - transforms him into the perfect
symbol of a generation lost to the authoritarianism, inequality, and
brutality of Brazilian society.
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The film's camera work, by cinematographer Rodolfo Sanches, is
highly subjective.  Point-of-view shots, showing the world from
Pixote's perspective, alternate with an objective camera revealing
the brutality faced by the film's characters.  Close-ups are common
in PIXOTE, as the director attempts to penetrate his youthful
characters' minds, to understand their feelings, to try to recover
some of their rapidly disappearing innocence, yet Babenco is not
judgmental or overly sentimental.  He creates a social inferno from
which there is no respite, no escape.  Yet brutality, degradation,
and violence somehow bounce off Pixote, and the last shot shows him
walking down a railroad track, smiling, as if nothing that he has
been through has actually happened.
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The film's initial sequences well exemplify its rhetorical
procedure.  The credits run on a black background and are
accompanied by John Neschling's somber, dramatic, almost dissonant
music.  After the credits, the screen continues to be black,
accompanied by the initially unidentified sounds of violence, of men
fighting.  The image then fades in to a close-up of a teenage black
male, eyes transfixed offscreen. There is a cut to another face,
eyes equally transfixed, then to a series of two-shots in which
faces are severed in half by the frame's edge.  In this sequence of
shots, distance from the camera gradually increases from the initial
close-up to a long-shot of other teenagers sitting against a wall,
each of them with eyes focused on an object still unseen by the
spectator.  Finally, the object of their gaze is revealed: a single
television set on the wall above them.  They are almost narcotically
transfixed by the violent images of a police thriller transmitted by
the set.
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The camera then tracks right, showing an increasing number of
adolescents in police custody.  It pauses slightly as it passes the
desk of an official talking on the phone, apparently to a lover, as
an anguished mother waits to tell him of her missing son.  With a
jump cut, the first sequence gives way to the second as a police van
arrives outside the building, where the teenagers are being held.  A
number of adolescents are taken out of the van, some in handcuffs,
among them several transvestites.
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The children are herded inside the building, where one of them says
that the police are picking everyone up in order to find someone on
whom to blame the murder of an old man. They then go through a sort
of roll call, in which it becomes obvious that most of them come
from families in which the father has either disappeared or died.
In fact, the first time the viewer sees Pixote, he responds to the
official's statement that his father's whereabouts are unknown with
the statement that his father is dead.  The official version,
however, is the only one admitted, and Pixote must answer that his
father is unknown.  PIXOTE thus paints, from its initial sequences,
a portrait of social and institutional violence and family
disintegration, with adolescents of whatever background confronted
with the impersonal face of uncaring, authoritarian figures.  Their
only outlet or means of temporary escape, the television, also
reflects a situation of violence.
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After the roll call, a cut initiates a sequence in which the camera
tracks along a darkened urban street accompanied by what turns out
to be Pixote's theme song, rendered with great tenderness.  The
camera then cuts to a close-up of Pixote inside a bus, being taken
to the reformatory where the first part of the film's narrative will
occur.  It is only then that the spectator realizes that the shots
of the city streets are from Pixote's perspective and he is isolated
as the film's protagonist.  The sequence, largely composed of shots
and countershots, thus initiates spectator identification with
Pixote.
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Although his film is clearly about social and institutional
injustice, Babenco, especially in the second part, lays no blame
directly on any single factor.  In the first part, the police are
corrupt and violent, the officials uncaring and sadistic, but
broader questions of social causes are not explored.  Babenco
prefers to focus on the adolescents themselves and their ultimate
corruption in contact with the adult world.  Social criticism enters
the film through its brutality and contrasts.  One particularly
striking sequence has three of the boys sitting on a rock
overlooking Rio de Janeiro's fashionable lpanema beach.  The
distance between their reality and that of middle- and
upper-middle-class Brazilian society is painfully apparent.
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The boys attempt to reconstitute their broken families among
themselves.  After their escape, Pixote, Dito, Lilica, and Chico
establish a makeshift family unit, with Dito and Lilica as the
``parents,'' the others as ``children.'' When they have food, they
share it equally among themselves. When they do not, they pretend
that they are not hungry. The prostitute Sueli becomes a lover to
Dito, a surrogate mother to Pixote, and a rival to Lilica.  In a
scene of great tenderness after Dito's death, Sueli, holding Pixote
in her arms, alternately plays his mother, sister, and lover, before
finally rejecting him and throwing him out, much as she had done
earlier with her aborted fetus.
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The children of PIXOTE are not unlike children anywhere. They are
frequently violent, often brutally so, yet their violence derives
from necessity and despair.  Their sometimes hardened exterior,
necessary for survival in the underbelly of Brazil's urban society,
belies a guarded innocence hoping for a chance in life.  Yet the
viewer knows that there is no tomorrow for these children.  The
railroad track at the end, frequently used as a symbol of hope in
the future, in PIXOTE leads nowhere.
Country of Origin: Brazil
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Release Date: 1980
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Production Line:  Sylvia B.  Naves for H.  B.  Filmes
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Director: Hector Babenco
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Cinematographer: Rodolfo Sanches
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Run Time: 127 minutes
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Video Available.
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Copyright (c) 1994 Magill's Survey of Cinema by Salem Press. All Rights Reserved.