Rio world

Salles's untrained Central Station

by Steve Vineberg

CENTRAL STATION Directed by Walter Salles. Screenplay by Joao Emanuel Carneiro and Marcos Bernstein. With Fernanda Montenegro, Vinicius de Oliveira, Marilia Pera, Soia Lira, and Othon Bastos. At Cinema 320.

At the beginning of Central Station, a series of disparate men and women dictate letters of affection, longing and heartbreak to Dora (Fernanda Montenegro), the aging ex-schoolteacher who sets up shop daily as a scribe in Rio de Janeiro's central station. The director, Walter Salles, frames the speakers in close-up while they convey their mournful and optimistic and erotic messages, as if they'd stopped by to have their photos taken, and their faces are wonderful, inspiriting. So is the shot of passengers invading a subway car by every available opening, thrusting arms and legs through the windows. There's a freshness to these first images; they aren't like anything you've seen. And for a while, as Dora returns to her apartment at the end of the day with her stack of letters and, playing God, determines which of them to mail and which to discard (the ones she can't decide about she consigns to a drawer), you think that this new film from Brazil might be a genuine discovery.

But once Salles and the screenwriters, Joao Emanuel Carneiro and Marcos Bernstein, set the story in motion, it turns out to be wetter and more conventional than you'd hoped. One of Dora's customers is a young woman named Ana (Soia Lira) with a small boy in tow, who is trying to make contact with Jesus, the child's estranged father. Not realizing that Dora -- determining that Jesus is a bastard and Ana is better off without him -- has torn up her first letter, Ana keeps returning to compose further ones. But then she's knocked down by a truck outside the station and killed, and her child, Josue (Vinicius de Oliveira), becomes one of the homeless kids who wander through the station, most of whom don't last long in brutal downtown Rio. (We see one boy get shot for stealing a bun.) Fernanda finds she can't maintain her usual cynical distance from this boy; she invites him home with her, and then she sells him to a couple who are willing to put him up for adoption. But her friend Irene (Marilia Pera, the great Brazilian actress who played the whore in Hector Babenco's Pixote) convinces her that the couple's motives are more sinister -- that Josue is too old to be a likely subject for adoption, and that more likely they plan to harvest him for organs. So Dora kidnaps him back and heads to the rural northeast of the country with the boy to help him track down his dad.

Soia Lira and the other actors who show up at Dora's post in Central Station don't have the practiced look of professional performers, and Vinicius de Oliveira certainly isn't one -- he's a shoeshine boy Salles found and cast in his picture. Salles -- like his countrymen Babenco when he made Pixote in 1981 -- is clearly working in Vittorio De Sica territory, and that's a noble approach to moviemaking. But most of Salles's narrative ideas aren't terribly interesting, and unlike De Sica (or Babenco), he doesn't know how to shape scenes dramatically. The section involving the couple who buy Josue from Dora is clumsily developed, and many of the episodes on the road are inert; some are even puzzling. Dora becomes enamored of a friendly truck driver (Othon Bastos), who picks them up along the way, but he vanishes just as she's begun to think of herself as a romantic object for the first time in many years. Salles neither confirms Dora's feelings about this man nor explains how she could have been so mistaken about him; he omits all the psychological information we need to make sense of this encounter.

Part of the problem is Fernanda Montenegro. Montenegro is a distinguished stage actress, and her performance in this movie has been thoroughly lauded (and nominated for an Oscar), but I found it impossible to track her emotionally. She doesn't provide any clue to explain her sudden decision to take on the boy, or to help us read her behavior when she sells him. You think she's being callous and greedy, yet this is inconsistent with the pity she seems to take on him when she observes how imperiled he is at the station. And is she really naïve enough to trust the couple she passes him onto? With her long, horsey face, Montenegro is a fascinating camera subject, but an impenetrable one, so her big dramatic scenes, which Salles loads into the last third of the picture, don't have anything to build on. And he sure doesn't have De Sica's gift for working with children. Vinicius de Olivieira has an adorable face, but he doesn't give a performance. The best acting is done by Marilia Pera, in the relatively small role of Irene.

Salles does have an eye, and intermittently you get the thrill of images like those early ones. There's a vivifying moment when a woman sings a hymn from the back of a truck that has stopped to give Dora and Josue a ride, and an extended sequence at a kind of religious carnival has a magic-realist flavor. I wasn't sorry I'd seen the movie, especially in a year when the imports have been so uninspiring, and when few of the other Christmas releases, foreign and domestic, offered any kind of original vision, even in spurts. At least part of the time, Salles offers a way of looking at the world that suggests someone's actual experience, not just the sum total of the experience of looking at other people's movies.