City of Men
Palm, $32.98
Given the generally sorry state of television (I'd say "these days," but let's be honest and just acknowledge that the majority of television history is a slog through mediocrity), it's big news when a true talent like Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Mereilles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) chooses to throw his hat into the ring. The Mereilles-produced City of Men, a 19-episode series about two young men growing up in one of Brazil's most notorious slums, goes a long way to expanding the vocabulary of television and moving the medium toward a more cinematic approach, much like The Wire and The Sopranos have done here in the States. The series follows two young friends, Laranjinha (played by Darlan Cunha) and Acerola (Douglas Silva), as they attempt to navigate both the psychological pitfalls of adolescence and the physical dangers of their favela. Like City of God, City of Men is shot in a frenetic, vivifying, highly original style, and it is in turns uplifting, depressing, harrowing, and extremely violent. Despite this, however, and as strange as it may sound, the similarities between this series and a show like The Wonder Years aren't to be shrugged off; as revolutionary as City of Men is in its setting and structure, its basic storylines will be familiar to anyone raised on American coming-of-age TV. Acerola and Laranjinha may be living in a nightmare world where armed drug dealers and teenage gangsters are the only real authority figures around and where the slightest misstep might result in death by gunshot, but their daily lives revolve around the most common of teen-show scenarios: looking for jobs, looking for girls, avoiding school, and generally getting into trouble. Sure, the jobs they're looking for are usually no better than con games, the women they're looking for have an unfortunate habit of getting pregnant, their school is a hole, and the trouble they get into causes them to run afoul of the most sinister types of people, but in the end, their story of becoming men is as common a tale as was ever filmed before a live studio audience.
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