Pixote (1980)

TV-MA, and basically for everything.  I'm going to intentionally be verbose on this so anything offensive doesn't show up in the preview of this page, but this movie is incredibly uncomfortable because every awful thing imaginable happens to children.  I don't know.  My Criterion Collection is starting to have me own movies that are kind of gross.  I'll talk more about this later.  Use your imagination.  All that and more happens.

DIRECTOR: Hector Babenco

Okay, sometimes I feel like Criterion needs to prep me for a horror show of misery.  I mean, I knew what I was getting into with Salo.  It had a reputation for being just brutal.  (Note: While Pixote is brutal and miserable, Salo is still way more unwatchable.) In the Realm of the Senses?  That one was my fault.  I wasn't the most cinematically literate when I went into that movie.  But Pixote was part of a box set by Martin Scorsese.  It's like walking into an independent bookstore and seeing one of those "Blind Date with a Book" books, only to find out that something abhorrent is going on in the book and you just wanted something interesting from another country.

Now, I'm going to go pretty intense with the concept of what is exploitation in this blog because it is fundamental to the movie, but I would like to start off by saying that it has good intentions.  The other movies I referenced are a little bit morally darker than Pixote.  Pixote is a weird movie because it is a rallying call against juvenile reform in Brazil.  Thank God I watched the Martin Scorsese introduction to this movie because there was some key information that so necessary to understanding this film.  Just because I assume that many people haven't seen Pixote, let alone watched the optional introduction by Scorsese, let me fill you in on the important things to know.  Hector Babenco was exclusively a documentarian before this point.  While researching and prepping for a documentary about reform programs in Brazil, he got booted by the people he was exposing for their crimes.  He still wanted to raise awareness for the plight of the criminal youth, so he simply adapted a book about the topic using real kids who had lived in this situation.  From a cinematic perspective, it looks nothing like a documentary and does have a quasi-traditional narrative.  That being said, it toes that line between fiction and nonfiction.

Okay, with that out of the way, I'm going to give Pixote points.  Normally, I would prefer if movies weren't necessarily vulgar.  I would blame the old man that I am on trying to keep movies clean, but I don't see a scenario where I would really get excited to watch something that toed the lines of taste.  Even when I was really into horror movies, there was always a line of "too far."  Now that I'm older, that line of "too far" is getting closer and closer, but I acknowledge that I've always kind of had that. Normally, I'd rail against these films, talking about how only truly artistic pieces should be touching on these subject matters.  It's that old chestnut: "I'll know it when I see it."  Pixote almost gets a pass.  I say "almost" for an important reason that I'll cover in a second.  Babenco is making this movie trying to wake up society to the unseen evils around them.  He really wants to stress how horrible it is to be one of these kids who are being abused and killed without raising any flags.  To do so, he doesn't want to go the Hollywood route of saying that this is a hopeful world.  There is a bit of distance between saying that someone was sexually abused and knowing the brutality of that abuse.  So I get Babenco's reasoning.

The only problem is, isn't he proliferating the very problem that he's trying to stop.  It's not like this is a movie where adults are playing children and showing the awful things that are going on.  These are kids who have to enact the very exploitation that really happens.  With the specific case of Pixote, they were kids who experienced this trauma in real life.  I mean, the real tragedy is that Fernando Ramos de Silva, the boy who played the eponymous protagonist, died at age 20.  It came from living this lifestyle.  He was functionally illiterate because he never received a proper education from this life he led.  Once this movie was over, basically, he had to go back to a version of this life because he couldn't memorize lines for other movies.  If you watch de Silva in this movie, it's mindboggling how good he is.  The kid is acting based on real experience and it is heartbreaking.  But this onus is kind of placed on Babenco. I know that he's got this good intention of trying to stop the system from swallowing up these children,  but he has a very real opportunity to help this kid and instead he just does what his oppressors did, only with a more noble intention.

I think I had the same righteous fury when it came to Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.  There was another movie that wanted to attack society and wanted to stress the evils that were unseen by the bulk of people.  But what it ultimately led to was the exploitation of his son and the lack of a healthy discussion about how that happened.  I don't know.  I really like Pixote as a concept.  I think there is a way to tell this story without being this intense. But I can also see the dangers that Babenco would run into.  There was probably a binary decision to be made:  go easy and not potentially make the impact needed or go hard and morals be damned.  I don't know.  This movie is such a knockout that I have a hard time coming down on a side that I should take.  I mean, it is tragic as heck knowing how this turned out.  But when progressive politics force the voice of the oppressed to become the oppressor, there's a problem there.  I guess I know that that we should be fighting the good fight against those who embrace the status quo, but this is the reason that people come down against the vocal.  It's because there's a hypocrisy that is skin deep.

In terms of story, there's something going on here that is hard to absorb.  Yes, Pixote follows a narrative that I could summarize for you. But this narrative is an exploration of character and setting and not so much with plot.  Because this is serving the role of a documentary without actually being a documentary, stories don't necessarily have clean resolutions.  Instead, Pixote is almost an observer of the many crimes that take place in this world.  It's odd, because the movie introduces Lilica and her crew as absolute monsters, first and foremost.  They rape a kid violently and Pixote, in horror, watches from under his covers.  Yet, Lilica becomes one of the more sympathetic characters in the movie.  Sure, we never really trust Lilica.  Lilica, like all of the kids in the movie, are fundmentally broken people.  They are motivated by self-interest.  But Lilica also takes a shine to Pixote throughout the movie and that's really all that is necessary to stand out as "one of the good ones" when the world is this bleak and desparing.  

But the message at the end, man, I have so many thoughts about it and I don't know how to really parse them out.  The movie ends with Pixote accidentally killing one of his friends and murdering an American john.  Even though Pixote does more and more adult things in the movie, it's hard to forget that he's a kid. But the final sequence has him regress to the mentality of being a toddler.  When offered comfort that toes the line between empathy and sexuality, Pixote starts breastfeeding on a prostitute who has recently self-aborted her child.  (I told you, this movie is potentially the most graphic thing ever.)  Her entire character is both a desire to be a mother and a loathing at the prospect of being a mother.  Pixote, when he breastfeeds on her, is initially embraced and comforted by words like "Mommy's here" until he is thrown away, and humiliated for thinking that this woman could be his mother.  The movie then ends with an oddly sunny shot of Pixote walking the rails, implying that his journey will continue to be a series of dark adventures into the despair of the homeless juvenile. 

Now, I like the idea of the motherhood angle, especially when talking about child psychology. There's the theory that unless a child meets certain childhood markers, they will never be able to move mentally onto the next stage of human development.  Sure enough, Pixote shows that in this scene.  Even though Pixote does drugs and has killed someone, he hasn't mentally grown beyond that of a toddler.  He has never been dependent, so he hasn't shed his need for dependence.  I also like the fact that this story won't end for Pixote.  This is not a problem that is solved with a quick moment in time.  But the sunniness of it all.  That's weird.  The funny thing is, the sun in that last shot let me know that the movie was ending.  It's such a stark contrast to the gloominess of the rest of the film that it let me mentally close the book on this movie.  It's just that the sun implies that things are hopeful when they absolutely aren't.  One of the things mentioned in the reform school was that the world out there was worse than in there.  Whiel I do think that concept is debatable, there is evidence that all of the characters who escaped are either dead or lost with the exception of Pixote, meaning that the sunny day might be a bit of a mislead.

But it is a story about setting.  Problems never resolve.  Sure, we find out what happened to the drug dealer who cheated them.  That's satisfying, if unrealistic.  But the deal that they made with...the other drug dealer (?) Cristal never gets paid off.  I kind of like that.  If the meaning of Pixote is that not everything is tied up with a nice little bow, it works that way.  Also, it is a reminder that Pixote will never find a place that he can call home.  If he went home, Cristal will get him.  But that just screams, "Brazil is a place you don't want to get stuck in if you are in the wrong social class."   It's pretty impressive.  

I don't know if I could love the movie knowing, intellectually and morally, what is happening here.  It's so important and so icky at the same time.  But man alive is it shot well and nails the themes of the film. Even after writing all of this, I'm still not sure what to believe about the movie.  I'm about to go to Letterboxd flummoxed, I'll tell you.