Central
Station
Reviewed
by Leonard Heldreth, December, 1999
Winner of an Academy Award
for Best Foreign Film as well as numerous other awards, Central Station
takes familiar elements—the developing bond between an older
woman and a child she has befriended—and places them in Rio de
Janeiro and the rural slums of Brazil while downplaying the potential
sentimentality in such a relationship. The plot falls into two parts:
the city scenes and the road scenes.
Dora (Fernanda Montenegro) is a former school teacher
who writes letters for people who are illiterate. She has a table
in the train station where she works all day, but in the evening at
home, she reads through the letters she has written with her friend
Irene (Marilia Pera), laughs at them, tears up some, and stores the
others in a drawer. Few if any are ever mailed. Cynical in a brutal
world (a man who steals a small cake is pursued and shot, people climb
through train windows to get seats before those who enter through
the doors), Dora has no family and only one friend, Irene.
One day a woman and her son pay Dora to write a letter
to the boy's father; the next day the woman is struck by a bus and
killed and the boy, Josue (Vincius de Oliveira), starts hanging out
near Dora's table since she's the only other person he knows. Initially,
she ignores the boy, but then one night she takes him home with her,
not because she is touched by his situation but because she wants
to sell him to an adoption agency. Realizing the adoption agency is
a front for an organ-selling syndicate, she steals the boy and sets
off on a journey to find his father. The second half of the film chronicles
their adventures on the road—traveling on the bus, riding with
a religious bus driver, witnessing religious rituals, and looking
for the boy's father.
Central Station is clearly in the tradition of Italian
Neo-realism, that post-World War II film movement that used documentary
techniques and paired a major star or two with a cast of unknowns
to capture, on location and using natural lighting, the poverty and
degrading living conditions in Italy in the mid- to late forties.
Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, and Roberto Rosellini created
films such as Open City, The Bicycle Thief, and Showshine. Director
Walter Salles' film is in that tradition with its picture of Brazilian
poverty, its two professional actresses in a cast of virtual unknowns,
and its location shooting (some people in the railroad station didn't
realize a film was being made and wanted Montenegro to write letters
for them). The boy, Vincius de Oliveira, was a shoeshine boy in an
airport where Salles discovered him. He had never been inside a movie
theater, and asked the director for money for food. Salles eventually
selected him over five hundred other boys who read for the part. Hector
Babenco, director of Pixote before coming to America and then of films
such as Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ironweed, similarly hired a street
boy to star in his film about the plight of street children, and he
used Marilia Pera to play the part of a prostitute who adopts the
boy. The boy, unfortunately, went back to the streets after the film
and was killed the next year. Let's hope de Oliveira fares better.
Fernanda Montenegro, who reminds me of an aged Giulietta
Masina, has won several awards for her performances, and she is excellent,
keeping the film from becoming sentimental. Marilia Pera adds warmth
in her role as Irene, and de Oliveira gives a fine performance as
Josue, although it's difficult to tell whether he's a good actor or
just playing himself. Central Station presents a different view of
life from most Hollywood movies, one that is often harrowing but one
that more Americans need to see. The film is in Portugese with very
readable subtitles.
