Lower City
Directed by Sergio Machaco
In Lower City, the seedy, impoverished waterfront environs of Northeastern Brazil's port towns are the setting for a stunning story of a love triangle born of the libido of desperation. Karina (played with seething sensuality by Alice Braga) is a young, streetwise stripper who suppresses her disillusionment and sadness, and barters her body for a boat ride to a place where she hopes she'll find a better life. The boatmen, Deco (Lázaro Ramos) and Naldinho (Wagner Moura), are best friends and business partners until they become bitter rivals for Karina's affections. Time and again, their unbridled jealousy and unmitigated anger erupt into brutality and bloodshed-both commonplace occurrences in their tough, unruly waterfront world of drunken and drugged-out fucking and fighting.
Directing his first feature film, Sérgio Machado, a protégé of Walter Salles (who produced Lower City), delivers unrelenting intensity and truth to the screen. The screenplay, which Machado co-authored with Karim Ainouz, consistently demands that the audience look beyond superficial lowlife stereotyping to understand the deeper humanity of the troubled Karina, Deco and Naldinho as each struggles to meet basic physical and psychological needs and seeks to experience some sense of purpose and light within the bleakness of Lower City life.
Cinematographer Toca Seabra's sensitive camerawork has an extraordinarily intimate quality as it moves from cockfight to fistfight, from moments of backlit lust to those of shadowy lament. Special mention should also be made of the mesmerizing soundtrack by Carlinhos Brown, who used percussion instruments he made from found objects as well as piano, guitar and sacred African instruments to create a distinctive kind of Bahian afro-jazz that supports the characters and often works in contrast to the images on the screen.