Bus 174 movie review & film summary (2003)

The director, Jose Padilha, films this scene with a digital camera, using the negative mode that switches black with white. The faces behind the bars cry out to us like souls in hell; nothing in the work of Bosch or the most abysmal horror films prepares us for these images. A nation that could permit these conditions dare not call itself civilized. Since prisoners are the lowest inhabitants of any society, how the society treats them establishes the bottom line of how it regards human beings. That prisons like this exist in Brazil makes it less surprising that the streets are filled with the lost and forgotten.

The conclusion of "Bus 174" is both surprising and inevitable. The bus hijacking captured the public's attention in a way that dramatized the plight of the homeless, and the film, by documenting the conditions of Sandro de Nascimiento and countless others, shows that the journey began long before the passengers boarded the bus.

If you have seen the masterful 2002 Brazilian film "City of God" or the 1981 film "Pixote," both about the culture of Rio's street people, then "Bus 174" plays like a sad and angry real-life sequel. Fernando Ramos da Silva, the young orphan who played Pixote, died on the streets some years after the film was made, and do Nascimento in a sense stands for him -- and for countless others.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46brKxlYWyBbn6PaWo%3D