When José Padilha made Bus 174, he was praised by many critics as having created a documentary that treated the poverty, addiction, desperation and corruption in Brazil's favela slums with exceptional sensitivity and care. Now, a few years later, after his film Elite Squad (a narrative film that was originally meant to be a documentary) has become the most expensive -- and most profitable -- film in Brazilian cinema history, a lot of the same critics are calling him a quasi-fascist.
What happened?
In a revealing interview with the Guardian, Padilha -- alternating between defensive hostility and sincere pleading -- makes the case that whatever people think of Elite Squad, it does nothing but portray the everyday reality he set out to film. The story of Bope, a police special forces unit that goes after Brazilian drug dealers and street gangs with the same murderous brutality with which the gangs go after each other, is so naked and unrelenting in its portrayal of the deadliest police killers since Cobra that it's easy to imagine the director meant it as an ode to oppression. And his star, Wagner Moura, is so charismatic it's hard not to read his bloodthirsty, enthusiastically torturing Captain Nasciemento as a hero.
But that's too shallow a read, according to the filmmaker. He insists he set out to make nothing more than a documentary (though the relentless voice-overs don't do much to banish a partisan mood), and if people respond to the brutality of the film, they're responding to the brutality of a system they helped create. While some of his defenses ring a bit hollow (such as his Nixonian claim that critics who attack his film are dope-addled intellectuals unaware that they're part of the problem) and his omission of the fact that Bope has been implicated in the murder of impoverished favela residents not involved in the drug trade is rather damning, he does make good points about how Nasciemento's popularity is understandable in a country that has done little to make its citizens feel safe, and some of his depictions of institutional dysfunction echo those of The Wire, a show few would attack as fascist.
Whatever one's read on the film's politics, it's extremely telling that, whie Padilha condems people who rail against the system while continuing to feed it, he admits that in order to facilitate filming in the favelas, he paid two sets of bribes: one to the neighborhood gangs not to attack him or his crew, and one to the neighborhood cops not to disrupt filming.
