OPERAÇÕES ESPECIAIS (2015)

The modern standard for Brazilian cop films was set by Jose Padilha's 2007 film Tropa de Elite, known in the Anglophone world as Elite Squad. Tomas Portella's film returns us to that violent milieu from the novel perspective of a female cop. Francis (Cleo Pires) is a bank employee who decides to try out for the police after rescuing a child during a robbery. To her disgust, she finds a bank security guard cowering in the same rest room where she'd taken the child. She proves a solid marksman, but learns quickly that shooting at targets is no substitute for the real thing.

While Francis turns out fairly badass, the film is realistic about her physical limitations. During one raid, she's bowled over effortlessly while guarding a stairwell when a suspect charges her. Portella and his co-writers also show her all too plausible terror during her baptism of fire, a combined car chase and fire fight. It's an impressively staged action scene, as are all the film's set pieces -- and it's made better by the director's emphasis on Francis's fear and discomfort as tight turns slam her from side to side of the car or bounce her off her partners. At one point, having struggled to pick her gun off the floor, she's crouched down in the back seat  after gunfire has blown out the rear window. One of her colleagues blasts away at the gangsters with his automatic next to her, and the empty cartridges rain down on Francis's neck while she frantically brushes them away.

That's Cleo Pires as Francis in the lower right in both shots.

Above, you can see a gangster jumping down from the upper left while another 

(in the little box just right of center) gets ready to open fire.

Francis careens from terror to recklessness in another major urban battle scene. The cops are trading fire with gangsters in a terraced apartment complex across the street, the gangsters hopping like mountain goats from terrace to terrace while gunmen try to cover their getaway. On the cops' side, a man is down and helpless with a leg wound, crying for help as Francis clings to cover. Finally she puts her own life in jeopardy, forcing her buddies to cover for her, as she drags the wounded man to shelter. She gets reprimanded for this, but it marks a turning point for her as she begins to overcome her rookie terror and win acceptance from her macho colleagues.

 The life of a cop is not all glamorous violence, but all over the world, that's what people pay to see.

 

Our heroes are federal police sent to a crime ridden town where an ex-cop is one of the leading gangsters and organized crime has much of the municipal infrastructure and public opinion on its side. At one point, the cops have to break out the candles and manual typewriters in order to take statements and file reports after their station loses power or, more likely, has it taken from them. I guess it's a good thing that they never throw anything out. The tide seems to turn after Francis loses a partner to a drive-by, but the politicians snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and reassign Francis and her team elsewhere. Despite that nod to the apparent facts of corruption in Brazil, Portella ends his film on an optimistic or at least a defiant note with the team arriving in a new town, ready for a new fight. Whether that means a sequel can be expected remains to be seen, but  Portella's skill as an urban action director and Cleo Pires' empathetic performance as Francis would make a reunion a welcome event.

HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMAN (Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês,1971)

The Vietnam War and the final throes of European imperialism inspired a wide range of revisionist views of confrontations between "civilized" and "primitive" peoples in 1970s cinema. While the benevolence of the white man was, to say the least, not taken for granted, the nobility of savages wasn't always taken for granted, either. Cinematic aboriginals ranged from the idealized Native Americans of revisionist U.S. westerns to the utter savagery, albeit provoked, of Italian cannibal movies. Nelson Pereira dos Santos's movie comes early in the wave and is more likely influenced by the global interest in the primal kulturkampf than by other countries' movies. While it may have given world audiences the fashionable thrill of seeing a white man undone by tribal folk, it doesn't exactly offer a blueprint for a Third World uprising. Como Era Gostoso is a grim, unheroic affair that sees brutality and selfish ambition everywhere, though its main attraction is probably its abundance of nudity, male and female.

The little Frenchman (Arduino Colassanti) never gets a name. Condemned by his own people, who are competing in 1594 with Portugal in the colonization of Brazil, he is weighed down with a ball and chain and dumped into the sea. He somehow makes it to shore and eventually falls in with some Portugese who make him their gunner. He gets captured by the Tupinamba tribe, to whom he struggles to prove that he is French, and therefore an ally, and not a Portugese enemy. They may not know either language, but they think they can tell the two apart when Europeans speak. Their chief, Cunhambebe (Eduardo Imbassahy Filho) decides that his prisoner is Portugese, mainly because he wants a slave to sacrifice as a ritual meal -- and the French trader who visits the Tupinambas regularly has no interest in correcting the chief's error. The most he'll do for his fellow Frenchman is hold out hope that Cunhambebe will eventually free him before he decides to kill him.

 

For the moment, the Frenchman is useful. The tribe has salvaged two small cannons from their raid, and their prisoner knows not only how to fire them but how to make more gunpowder. Cunhambebe hopes for a decisive victory against his tribe's traditional enemies, the Portuguese-allied Tupiniquins. While he prepares for war, the Frenchman introduces the tribeswomen to new ideas in agriculture, sheds his European clothes and cuts his hair tribal style. This last bit actually makes it easier for Cunhambebe to grab him and yank him around, to assert his dominance. You can see concern in the chief's eyes even as everything seems to go his way -- a suspicion that his slave and his cannon might get more credit for the eventual victory over the enemy tribe. Meanwhile, the Frenchman has been given a woman, Seboipepe (Ana Maria Magalhães) and notices that the "bead" she wears in her navel is actually a silver coin. He and the trader find a buried treasure but squabble over the split, our hero killing his momentary partner. He's still hoping to make a break, maybe with the woman and definitely with the treasure. Everything comes to a head when Cunhambebe decides abruptly, after brooding in the middle of a victory celebration, that it's time for his slave to die. The girl explains the role the Frenchman must play in a scripted ritual, and stops him from escaping with his loot. The climactic question is whether the ritual is symbolic only, whether a Pocahantas scenario will be played out, or whether Cunhambebe ain't playin'...

 

The objectification of the Frenchman is the starkest fact of the story. If the French think of him as a criminal, and the Portuguese as an enemy, the Tupinambas see him as food, albeit a special kind of meal they can taunt as he's dragged into their village. This taunting may make the Tupinambas seem more evil or depraved, if not more savage, than the mindless-seeming cannibals of Italian gore films. The more that we see that the Tupinambas have a culture, from their elaborate rituals to their purely ornamental fashion sense, the more disturbing their cannibalism seems and the more, perhaps, we want to think that they don't really mean it, that all this talk of eating someone is just a game. Seboipepe;s attitude may be the most troubling of all; does she grow truly affectionate toward the Frenchman, or is she simply turned on by the idea of playing with her food? Despite any horror we feel toward his fate, it remains hard to root for the Frenchman, as he remains viciously greedy in a way the filmmakers may have felt was characteristically European for the time. Como Era Gostoso is a film without a hero, since Cunhambebe seems hardly less odious in his egotistical ambition and readiness to exploit the white man and his weapons. As the chief, Filho practically steals the film from Colassanti, his surly ambition trumping the title character's somewhat generic traits. He manages more than anyone else to convey a performance with body language and facial expressions while speaking a language foreign to him and parading about practically starkers. The cast as a whole manages to transcend self-consciousness in portraying the topless and bottomless tribespeople, probably because they understand that feathers and bodypaint are as much their clothing and their identity as shirts, pants, etc. are ours.

Dos Santos films in appropriately spare style, stripping the story of any European romanticism while showing off impressive art direction in the Tupinambas village. While the quotations from contemporary writers commenting on native savagery really only interrupt the story, except for a probably predictable epilogue, they don't disrupt the viewer's immersion into an authentically alien human environment. The picture's invocation of a dead culture is convincing, though one might wonder whether dos Santos meant ultimately to show that it deserved death. No paradise was lost, it seems, and primitive life promises no refuge for a drop-out from European civilization, whether accidental or deliberate. How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman is a vision of human nature in the raw, in more than one sense, and has a place in movie history as a discordant variation on the savage-vs.-civilized theme.

ELITE SQUAD:THE ENEMY WITHIN (Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora e Outro, 2010)

Jose Padilha's sequel to his 2007 Brazilian blockbuster stands in relation to the original somewhat as Magnum Force does to Dirty Harry. Like Don Siegel's Eastwood epic, the original Tropa de Elite was accused of "fascism" in some quarters for its endorsement (if not advocacy) of uncompromising tactics in the war on street crime. Like the second Harry film, Tropa de Elite 2 appears to tell the critics, "this is what fascist cops look like," while stressing that the original hero would fight such people. Back in 2008, in one of my first reviews for this blog, I wrote that whatever its attitude toward police and crime, Elite Squad didn't feel like a fascist film; despite an apparent contempt for leftist opinion, it was too pessimistic, with too much emphasis on the essential thanklessness of the supercops' work and too little emphasis on glory and vindication. If anything, the sequel is more pessimistic, bordering on noir in its emphasis on a flawed hero's strategic error and the ruins of his personal life, while its attitude toward the left is somewhat less adversarial when you subtract personal factors. The main thing, however, is that Elite Squad 2 is a grim, hard-hitting account of a comprehensively corrupt socio-political system that may be more than one man can master.

Beto Nascimento (Wagner Moura) still hopes to master the system. The primary hero of the first film is now a colonel in the BOPE (aka the "Skulls") but is kicked upstairs after a prison riot hostage situation ends in a fiasco of a massacre of convicts. The incident proves a PR disaster because the hostage negotiator called in is Diogo Fraga (Irandhir Santos), a leftist professor with political ambitions who did seem to have the crisis under control before Beto's old colleague Andre Matias (Andre Ramiro)reflexively kills the lead hostage-taker. Fraga flaunts his bloodstained shirt before the TV cameras and denounces the police. For Beto, the most galling thing about the debacle is that Fraga is the stepfather of Beto's son, the husband of his ex-wife. As our representative leftist, however, Fraga is a less cartoonish figure than the student radicals from the first film. Beto's voiceover during a Fraga lecture establishes our hero's contempt for the man's beliefs, but in fact Fraga seemed to be an effective negotiator and he'll later prove Beto's most reliable ally in the struggle with the system. If anything, Beto ends the film closer to Fraga's viewpoint than to any "fascist" opinion -- but he'll always feel that "human rights" are secondary to the need to wipe out crime and corruption. And his attitude toward Fraga will remain clouded by the suspicion that his replacement is teaching his boy to hate him for what he is -- a tough cop.

When is Diogo Fraga in more trouble: when he's held at gunpoint (above)

or when Beto Nascimento is angry at him (below)?

Beto ends up with more authority over the Skulls and uses it to turn the group into a "war machine" that actually makes a major dent in the drug trade in Rio's slums. He knows that chasing the dealers away (or killing them) is only the first step in eliminating corruption. The next -- dealing with corrupt cops -- he expects to be easier.

 

Beto expects corruption to dry up when the cops no longer have dealers to pay them protection money. This is his big mistake. It turns out that by wiping out the slum drug gangs he had only eliminated the middlemen and opened the door for the corrupt cops themselves, led by the monstrous Major Rocha (Sandro Rocha) -- a minor character in the first movie -- to take over the slums as all-encompassing extortionists. Worse for Beto, Rocha and his "militias" have political cover; they can now deliver votes to the local governor and a political boss who has his own raucous TV talk show. The militias take a cut of everything, from portable cooking fuel to bootleg cable TV. For the film's purposes, they're worse than the gangs that Beto eliminated -- but for the moment (Beto narrates in retrospect, the film starting in typical modern crime-story faction with a present-day burst of violence before flashing back to four years ago) he doesn't realize what's going on.

The bad and the ugly: Major Rocha punishes a slum vendor for not paying (above) while celebrity legislator Fortunato (Andre Mattos) taunts the government on his TV show.

One neighborhood remains to be cleansed. The politicians have saved it so they can keep crime alive as an election issue. Rocha stages a robbery of a police arsenal and blames it on neighborhood gangs in order to justify a BOPE sweep, led by Andres, freshly reinstated after being thrown under the bus over the prison fiasco, but not as reliable as the militia leaders want. When his plastic-bag torture of a gang leader leads Andres to suspect that the gangs didn't do the robbery, Rocha has both Andres and the gang leader killed.

 

But nosy journalists with connections to Fraga, now a legislator, begin to piece together the truth. Following up on a loose remark by his son, who works in Fraga's office, Beto has Fraga's phone line tapped in time to hear him talk to the journalist, who has discovered evidence not just of the weapons but of the militias' political ties, just as Rocha comes down on her, assuring the writer of a gruesome fate. Having taken her phone, Rocha knows, just as Beto does, that she was talking to Fraga right up to her capture. Beto realizes that not just Fraga but his ex-wife and son are in mortal danger -- and once he makes a move to protect them, his life will also be in jeopardy....

Tropa de Elite 2 is a sweeping portrait of systematic corruption that transcends political labels. If anything, Beto's escalating confrontation with "the system" at all its levels reveals Padilha's agenda as radical rather than "fascist." The issue in either film has never been what sort of political system Brazil needs but the pressing need for root-and-branch reform. To the extent that the sequel makes that more clear and gradually sets aside the first film's superficial anti-leftist rhetoric as Beto overcomes his personal animosity and tentatively joins forces with Fraga, it's a dramatic improvement on the first Elite Squad. The fact that both Wagner Moura and Irandhir Santos give great performances, supported by a range of seedy types worthy of an American, Italian or Japanese crime saga, certainly enriches the sequel, which should be an enrichment of the original story. Beto may be an obnoxious narrator for some viewers early on, but as his misadventures open his eyes and ours Elite Squad 2 becomes a riveting thriller that renews the original's promise of a Brazilian or South American crime or cop genre to rival the benchmark work of the U.S., Japan and Italy. Here's hoping for more where that came from.

THE POPE'S TOILET (El Bano del Papa, 2007)

I couldn't resist the title when it leered out at me from an Albany Public Library shelf, but this collaboration by writer-directors Cesar Charlone and Enrique Fernandez, though often funny, isn't nearly as sacrilegious as one might want. The Pope is the long-lived but unimaginatively-named John Paul (or Juan Pablo for our protagonists) II, but the toilet isn't meant for him to leave relics in. The setting is Melo, a Uruguayan town near the border with Brazil. One of the few booming business sectors there is smuggling consumer goods by bicycle across the border, presumably to avoid import duties, and selling them to local stores. There are many small-time operators, most operating on simple pedal power, a lucky few with motorbikes. It's a risky vocation. If you try to cross at the official border crossing, you may have to deal with the military. Try to cut through farmland or pasturage and you have to deal with the customs police. It's not clear which is worse, but Meleyo, the local customs cop, is corrupt. In practice, that means he'll take your stuff and keep it or sell it himself. It also means you might be able to do business with him.

Beto, our protagonist, is one of the humble pedal-power smugglers, a little smarter than the others, knowing to hide behind a big rock when Meleyo descends on the others, but not exactly the brightest star in the sky either. He's a poor man in a poor town. He has to use an outhouse at the house he shares with his wife Carmen and his daughter Silvia. He dreams of getting a motorbike to make his smuggling errands easier, while Silvia dreams of being a radio announcer. Her dreams are stoked by the Uruguayan media descending on Melo in the year of our story, 1988, to report on an impending visit and speech by the Pope during a South American tour. The Papal pilgrimage is a potential bonanza for the whole town. At a minimum, 20,000 people are expected to come to hear His Holiness. Everybody seems to be looking for a way to exploit the expected tourists. People are going into debt, taking out second mortgages, etc., to buy supplies to make cakes, chorizo sausages, etc., to sell to the hungry crowds. Beto has an even better brainstorm. With all these people noshing in the name of God, isn't there likely to be a demand no one's thought of meeting yet? That's where our titular toilet comes in. Beto intends to build a pay toilet for the tourists. He could well make enough to afford his motorbike, but he needs money up front for the toilet and building supplies. Never mind plumbing; he and his family can take care of changing the water and so forth. Still, it's going to be expensive, and some recent screwups have made many people reluctant to stake him for smuggling trips. He may have to tap into his wife's savings, which are meant to pay for Silvia's college education, and he may have to cut a deal with the devious Meleyo, the persecutor of his friends, with no guarantee that the customs cop can be trusted....

Beto is an Uruguayan Ralph Kramden, albeit in better shape thanks to the bicycle, and The Pope's Toilet is a classic get-rich-quick scheme narrative in a fresh setting. It's also an amusing but not overstated social satire in which everyone thinks of a visit by the unwordly pontiff as a chance to strike it rich. Carmen is just as much an Alice analogue, often scathing in her criticism, sometimes treated more roughly than Alice Kramden ever was, but just as worldly wise and just as devoted to her man. There's a "Baby, you're the greatest" moment when, with Beto's dream dashed because she shamed him into refusing to accept Meleyo's money, she wordlessly puts her jar full of savings on the kitchen table so Beto can make a last-minute run across the border to buy a toilet and race back in time for the Pope's arrival. Beto's run provides the dramatic climax as Meleyo catches up to him, having intended to pay him after all, only to take umbrage when Beto definitively refuses his money. In his petty wrath he does the one thing customs cops supposedly can't do: he confiscates Beto's bicycle, forcing our hero to lug the toilet the last miles back to Melo on foot, in what might be seen as the most sincere pilgrimage of this supposedly special day.

While I began to anticipate how the story would turn out, I imagine that Uruguayan audiences watched the whole film in a different way if they remembered the Pope's visit to Melo. From the standpoint of the cottage tourist industry that sprung up there, it was a fiasco. Instead of the estimated 20,000 or the hoped-for 100,000, the film tells us that only 8,000 people attended the papal speech. There's a poignant montage of all the leftover food from all the stalls that ends up dumped for dogs and pigs to eat, followed by a hint that Beto may have made a better investment in the long term. Meanwhile, the TV reports as if the papal visit had been a triumph for Uruguay. As a host urges the Pope to come back soon, Beto throws a drink at the barroom TV set.

As represented by The Pope's Toilet, Melo is a modest but gratifying stop on my itinerary around the wild world of cinema. The film features a striking combination of realistic grunginess and vivid cinematic landscapes. The co-directors have a strong pictorial sense (Charlone did the cinematography) and an eye for following action that comes through best in the opening chase with Meleyo in his truck pursuing the bicycling smugglers. The acting is good across the board as far as I can tell from listening to the Spanish dialogue, with Cesar Trancoso as Beto naturally standing out. The film has collected a lot of awards from Latin American festivals, deservedly so in my opinion, and it comes to American DVD via Film Movement's "movie of the month club," to which the Albany library admirably subscribes. This isn't the sort of extreme experience of one kind or another that many movie bloggers seek out, but I think it would have held its own had it appeared in the golden age of international art-house cinema on big screens across America.

An Uruguayan landscape with two bicyclists (lower right) by co-director/cinematographer Cesar Charlone.

Film Movement has an English-subtitled trailer for the movie on YouTube, so here it is.

ELITE SQUAD (Tropa de Elite - Brazil, 2007)

Reportedly the most popular Brazilian film ever, and a controversial winner at this year's Berlin Film Festival, Tropa de Elite has been accused of a fascist tendency, as is just about any film that appears to applaud extreme measures against criminals. I usually regard that as an absurd charge, especially when lone-wolf vigilantes are called fascists -- since when have you ever heard of lone-wolf fascists? How well would the charge stick this time? I determined to find out by checking out the DVD.

First, here's an attempt to sell the film to the English market.




This trailer gives a somewhat wrong impression of the story. Take a look at the Brazilian trailer and you'll notice a different emphasis even if you can't follow the Portuguese.




The point of contention in determining whether Tropa de Elite is a "fascist" film is its attitude toward its protagonists. If anything, the Anglo trailer suggests a more "fascist" film since it presents the movie unambiguously as a story of heroes trying to clean up the system. The movie itself is more ambivalent.

The movie opens on the night of a street party in a Brazilian slum in 1997. A narrator explains that Rio de Janiero has 700 slums infested with gangs that own military-quality ordinance. Outmanned and outgunned, most cops content themselves with taking bribes and looking the other way. The narrator explains: "Honesty isn't part of the game. When honest cops go into the streets, bad shit usually happens." We see some about to happen. Two snipers look like they're about to shoot a cop. After they fire, chaos breaks out, but before it can resolve itself, the title card comes up, and we flash back six months.

The narrator is Capt. Nascimento, who's contemplating retirement from the BOPE, our titular Elite Squad. Numbering only 100 men, they are reputedly incorruptible and ruthless, as much the enemies of corrupt cops as of the gangs of the slums. They sport a death's-head logo and use "Skulls" as a nickname and battle cry.

The two snipers from six months later are introduced as rookie officers Neto and Matias. Neto is a hothead, Matias a straight-arrow who wants to be a lawyer. He attends college classes and hooks up with classmates in an NGO operating in one of the slums -- as can only be done with the consent of the gangs. Matias' storyline gives ammunition to critics who want to question the movie's political agenda. He's shown rebelling against the conventional wisdom of the classroom, where Foucault-reading potheads parrot the lefty line that cops are nothing but corrupt instruments of plunder and oppression. During a classroom discussion, he tells his peers (who don't know he's a cop) that "sometimes there has to be repression" and that they've been brainwashed by the news media. Writer-director Jose Padilha seems contemptuous toward the students, who're portrayed as naive irresponsible elitists whose addictions empower the slum gangs.

Neto is assigned to a motor pool and grows increasingly frustrated by the poverty of the department, which has to cannibalize newer cars to fix older ones. He and Matias are friends from childhood, and as they learn about the corruption throughout the force, they hatch a plan to steal some payoff money to buy parts for the cars. They discussed this with another cop who ultimately didn't take part in their scheme, but looks likely to get blamed forward. Now we're back to the beginning of the picture, and we learn that Neto and Matias are trying to prevent the other cop's assassination. They emerge with honor from the fracas, and enter the BOPE training program.

It isn't until the film's halfway over that we get the brutal boot-camp sequences that usually come earlier in such a movie. Capt. Nascimento explains that only five out of every 100 trainees makes it through. The object is to learn who won't crack under pressure. Nascimento is especially interested in this class because he wants one of them to replace him. His wife's having a baby and is pressuring him to quit the squad. All this is happening in the middle of a campaign to clean out a particular slum near where the Pope plans to stay during a visit to Rio. The training involves mass beatings and gross-out ordeals such as having to eat slop off the ground in only ten seconds. When the grass isn't licked clean in that time, one unlucky cop is ordered to eat all that remains. When he pukes upon it, everybody has to join back in the repast. Eight men make it out of the first round, including Neto and Matias.

Meanwhile, a newspaper photo showing Matias at the scene of the slum battle outs him as a cop for his college buddies and their gang patron, Baiano. He plans to ambush Matias when the good cop meets a slum kid to give him a pair of glasses, but Neto ends up going instead. Neto screwed up during the final training exercise, a live slum raid, but has done well since then, killing 30 people in one week as part of the ongoing "Operation Holiness." This avails him not, as Baiano's men fatally wound him. Upon learning from a tattoo that he's BOPE, Baiano freaks out, since he understands that the Elite Squad will take ruthless vengeance on all involved. He takes out his anger on some college kids, one of whom is necklaced, trapped in tires like a Michelin Man and set ablaze, in the movie's most extreme sequence.

Baiano knows his enemy. Matias has had enough of the "stupid potheads" who are mourning the college kids but not his friend Neto. He wades into a memorial march and starts punching people out and pretty much kisses off Maria, his onetime girlfriend. He joins the manhunt for Baiano, in which torture is a routine investigative tool. Baiano is finally tracked down for a brief rooftop chase that leads to Matias' final test. Nascimento, who first envisioned Neto as his successor, will put it on Matias if he can execute Baiano in cold blood (in the face optional). But it's already too late for Nascimento. He threw a fit at home after Neto's death, provoking his wife to leave him.

So it's a hard knock life for the Tropa de Elite. There aren't happy endings for anyone. Nascimento's life is ruined, Neto is dead, and Matias appears to have given up his ideals of the rule of law. None of them are made heroes for their trouble, and in the end, how much have they accomplished? They made a dent in one slum. There's damned little of the glory that true fascists would heap upon such men. If anything, Padilha seems to see them as a symptom of the disease of massive inequality, rather than a cure. They're part of an overall brutalization of society, not really an attempt to reverse it. Audiences may applaud Matias' final act -- I don't know if they did -- but you could just as easily regard it as a tragic ending, given his original aspirations. If fascism requires a leader or group for people to rally around, neither Nascimento nor his Squad fits the bill, and I think that's the way the filmmakers meant it.

I enjoyed Tropa de Elite, but on the first viewing that's due more to its revelations of the breadth of corruption in Rio than its aesthetic qualities. Padilha's work strikes me as appropriately low-tech and gritty for a subject that should be handled in a realist style. It's a fair companion piece to City of God, the film that put Brazilian crime on the movie map. The films share a writer, Braulio Mantovani, who appears to be a key figure in the developing Brazilian crime genre. Padhila, who also made Bus 174, will be one too if Hollywood doesn't poach him soon. But the Internet Movie Database tells me that he's set to direct Don Cheadle in a film due in 2010.

The American DVD is a no-frills affair, the only extras being three trailers (The Aura, Chronicle of an Escape, and Days of Glory). I watched it on a ten-year old TV, so I can't make meaningful judgements about picture quality, but it's at least a serviceable widescreen edition. You can watch it in the original Portugese or an American dub. I opted for the original but sampled the dub. It's not terrible but the voices all sound generically American, which kills the film's authenticity. Fans of international crime or cop cinema ought to like it