Suffer the Little Children

Made in Mexico in 1950 by the great surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, this is still the hardest hitting movie about youth forged through violence and poverty. Los Olvidados is the film City of God could have been back in 2002, had a priority been placed on substance over style. In fact, many movies have plumbed this subject matter in the last sixty years, trying to do Buñuel one better, but none have succeeded thus far. The fourth season of The Wire brilliantly tackled similar material, it should be required viewing for all adults, but there were twelve hours to tell that story while Los Olvidados got it done in eighty minutes.

When I called this movie hard hitting, I wasn't kidding. Upon release it lasted only two days in theaters before being banned. There were some who wanted Luis Buñuel deported. The authorities were concerned that the movie made Mexico City look like a terrible place to live. In truth, this story is universal. There are kids growing up in these situations in every culture and big city of the world, whether it's Dallas or Los Angeles, Brussels or Beijing.

Inspired by Shoeshine, Vittorio De Sica's 1946 neorealist film, Buñuel took to the streets in ragged clothes to research his subject firsthand (Sullivan's Travels anyone?). He was relatively new to Mexico, being born in Spain and having directed his earliest pictures in France (1929's Un Chien Andalou and 1930's L'Age D'or). After meeting real children living like the ones we see in his film, Bunuel knew more of Mexico City's dark underbelly than did most of its middle to upper class citizens. Even better, despite a low budget and a miniscule three week shooting schedule, he was determined to expose it.

This isn't really a “message movie” though. Buñuel offers no solutions. He paints a very bleak portrait, and doesn't pretend anything will be done about it. Nothing has, after all, and perhaps nothing will. Even worse, perhaps nothing can. I guess this is why I remain doubtful when a politician comes up with a “solution” to a problem. There are no new problems. The fundamentals have not changed in decades, perhaps centuries. When I read Dostoyevsky, for example, I'm always shocked at how little has changed in this world over the last century and a half. People have invented solutions to the very same problems for time immemorial, and yet, the problems are still here. So what good were these “solutions”? Then again, what does it say about us if we don't try? If the illusion of progress disappeared, what then? It would be like giving up.

Buñuel was wise to focus on children here. We expect an adult to be responsible, which makes them easier to judge. If a man's family is starving, we say he needs to get a job. If his teenager is causing problems, it is his responsibility to rectify the issue. Simple enough, we would like to think. But what of the children born into homes where this doesn't happen, for whatever reason, and those reasons are beyond the child's control?

What of the youngsters like Jaibo (Roberto Cobo), the villain of this piece if there is one, who never knew his parents and grew up on the streets. He beats and robs the blind and handicapped because it's what he knows. Living like a stray dog in the slums, he learned to survive as an animal would; treating his environment as a jungle and its people as his prey. He's a predator, and the movie treats him as such, but did he have another option? The main character, a boy named Pedro (Alfonso Mejía), wants to be a good kid but falls in with the wrong crowd. His young mother resents him each day for being the living, constant reminder of a rape she suffered at age fourteen. Another boy, Ojitos (Mário Ramírez), is told to wait for his father's return at the marketplace, but his father never comes back. Alone and afraid, the boy is taken in by a “generous” man, who turns out to be a pedophile.

The actual title of this movie is “The Forgotten Ones”, and that's what these kids are. Forgotten by family, forgotten by society, left to roam aimlessly, defining survival as the acquirement of food or money through bloodshed. The ones who live long enough to reach puberty will likely be tomorrow's rapists, and barring abortion, we end up with another unwanted child like Pedro.

Those familiar with Buñuel's surrealist pictures, including The Exterminating Angel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and the two I mentioned earlier, may be surprised by his technique here. It's as if he took the Italian neorealist style of De Sica and Rossellini, and gave it a surrealist flourish. For the most part we see honest, painful realism, but then Buñuel springs a dream sequence on us that would feel right at home in even his strangest film. Pedro's dream amplifies the themes of the picture with bizarre sounds and imagery; chicken feathers fall like snow, Pedro's mother seems to walk on air before offering him a huge slab of raw beef, intercepted in desperation by the monster under his bed, Jaibo.

Los Olvidados is a tough movie, but also a great one. It shows us that certain social problems have no boundaries in the form of time or culture; they remain persistent and universal. It reveals the vicious cycle of poverty; laying bare the way violence begets violence. In one shot, deep in the distance, we see a busy highway. From the slums, this bridge and everything it represents (progress, civility, balance, order) appears to be light years away, like another world. Society's reaction is to make sure these people remain on the fringe of civilization, like a colony of lepers, neither seen nor spoken of. Again, forgotten.

This brings me to another issue I have with City of God. In that film, our “hero” is just as poor as the other kids, and equally inundated with violence. Somehow, he resists. Instead of taking an active part in gang violence, he starts taking photographs of the slum wars in Rio. He sends these pictures into the newspaper, becomes a famous photographer, and lives happily ever after. He's the anomaly, the exception. The one who got out. By making him the centerpiece of the story, we turn all this madness and destruction into a story of inspiration. We see him and think he's proving everyone wrong, like Rocky Balboa. The underdog wins (or the “slumdog” in Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire), and of course, “if he can do it, anyone can!” The only problem is, most of them can't. Most of them never escape. So in the process of patting one boy on the back and leaving the theater with smiles on our faces, we make it easier to ignore the millions of kids still trapped in an endless cycle.