"Here lies the tragic originality of Cinema Novo for the world cinema: our originality is our hunger, and our greatest woe is that, because it is felt, this hunger is not understood."
-Glauber Rocha from "Aesthetic of Hunger" (1965)
Pixote is directed by Hector Babenco. Babenco is not a Cinema Novo director strictly speaking, but with Pixote, he continues the work of Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos into the naive bliss of the Reagan years. Thus, the echoes of Rocha's above statement sound prophetically true: this hunger will be tragically misunderstood.
The film begins with a documentary introduction of Babenco showing us a Brazilian shanty town, the place where the stars of his film actually live (not merely a setting). Pixote (Fernando Ramos da Silva), for example, lives with his mother and nine siblings. In the introduction, Babenco furthermore tells us that of Brazil's 120 million population, 50 percent are under the age of twenty-one, and the film that follows will focus on the chaos that these children live in: as minors, they are not prosecuted for crimes, at most getting a few months in a detention center. As a result, these children sometimes end up being taken advantage of by adults who use them to commit criminal acts.
The rest of the film follows Pixote, the main character, from a reformatory to his life of getting by on the streets. Pixote faces horror after horror in both the reformatory and outside world with an almost surreal, unaffected countenance. Perhaps the most telling scene is a conversation between Pixote and Lilica (Jorge Juliao) who is arguably the most memorable character; a transvestite and the oldest of the children. Lilica (not in drag for the scene) asks Pixote, "What can a queer expect from life?" Pixote answers, "Nothing, Lilica." Lilica understands the import of their circumstances unlike the others, if only because he is nearing eighteen. Pixote, on the other hand, does not step back to evaluate his hunger, but lives with it.
Seldom does a film confront us with such stark reality. The film itself ends with Pixote walking down the railroad tracks, but the cinematic closure does not stop at the hunger that Rocha speaks of as requiring understanding. The situation is bigger. Fernando Ramos da Silva who played Pixote, returned to a life of crime and was killed in a police shootout in 1987. Babenco went on to make critically acclaimed Hollywood films such as Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ironweed before returning to Brazil to make his more recent films. These are also the facts of Babenco's film and the world he captured in it.
IMDb rates this film 7.9 out of 10
Film 101 rates this film 5 stars out of 5 (not red stars)
Roger Ebert includes this film in his selection of Great Films
A helpful introduction to third cinema can be found at thirdcinema.blueskylimit.com
