The Whole World is Watching

Man with a movie camera: Brazilian hijacker Sandro do Nascimento holds his audience captive.

A hijacker captures the eyes of Brazil in Bus 174.

by Sam Adams

"Look at me!" screamed Sandro do Nascimento, and for the afternoon of June 12, 2000, much of Brazil complied. His head bound in a T-shirt, the figure who took a city bus and its 11 passengers hostage never identified himself, and though José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda’s documentary doesn’t show us any of the media coverage that blanketed the country that day, the indications are that do Nascimento was portrayed as a lunatic, a ranting crazy who deserved to be put down like a mad dog. In part, Bus 174 sets out to fill in that reductive sketch, to humanize the undoubtedly deranged (and most likely strung-out) do Nascimento, a 21-year-old who’d lived most of his life on the streets, and seen his mother stabbed to death when he was 6. ("Butchered" is the word his onetime social worker uses.) But like Gimme Shelter or Paradise Lost, Bus 174 sees crime as society’s distorted reflection, a funhouse mirror enlarging defects to the point where they’re impossible to overlook.

None of the victims or policemen who witness the crime can provide a straightforward explanation of what do Nascimento hoped to gain by hijacking the bus. As the drama plays out, his demands grow more urgent without becoming any clearer; the few that remain consistent and intelligible are patently absurd (i.e. a repeated request for grenades). It's left to a sociologist to theorize, a bit too neatly, that do Nascimento was "hungry for social existence," an appetite that the throngs of camera crews surrounding the bus eagerly fed. Though he screams out, "This isn't a Hollywood movie!" do Nascimento was very much ready for his close-up.

Ignoring the police's ineffectual attempts to keep them back, camera crews swarm the bus like a single, amorphous entity, as if to make up for a lifetime of willful ignorance. "Hey Brazil, check this out -- I was at Candelria," do Nascimento screams, proclaiming his place at the site of a notorious massacre where undercover police officers fired into a group of sleeping street children, some of whom may have provoked them earlier in the day. Bus 174 exposes a system where police officers are poorly paid and ill-trained -- it's a job of last resort -- and children without homes must survive largely on their own, forming an expansive network of juvenile drug dealers, assassins and petty criminals. (See City of God or Our Lady of the Assassins for the fictional version.) Even as do Nascimento proclaims, "This ain't no action movie," he talks like it is, and even threatens to emulate one. "I'm gonna put on the heat!" he yells several times, creating his own catch phrase, and warns the police that if they don't accede to his demands, he's going to start throwing bodies out the door "like in that airplane movie on TV last night."

Much of the hijacking, though, is characterized by inaction. In his zest to yell out to the world, do Nascimento more than once sticks his head and shoulders outside the bus window, dropping his gun to his side in the process. But even though the police have snipers hiding behind a wall perhaps a dozen yards away, they don't take the shot. The officer in charge is shown talking on a cellular phone -- to a government official, we're told, with the implication that no one wanted to see a man's brains splattered on live television. But it's conceivable the order was given and no one knew, since the police are so poorly equipped they're left using hand signals to communicate with each other.

With footage of herself playing in the background, one hostage relates how she knelt down behind her seat after do Nascimento took control of the bus, but rather than using her cell phone to call the police, she called work, to tell them she'd be "a bit late"; a drug addict brandishing a pistol is a minor inconvenience, a speed bump, nothing (and no one) to be concerned about. Such complacency was exactly what do Nascimento, however fuzzily, set out to shatter, and Bus 174 eagerly follows his lead. There isn't one scene of the crime, but many, all leading to an awful situation exacerbated by one man's delusion and an unbelievably incompetent police response. (According to interviews with Padilha, Bus 174 is now being used as a training film in cities all over Brazil -- except for Rio.) The film opens with a helicopter shot that takes in Rio's bustling downtown, the villas of the wealthy and finally moves up to the slums in the hills around the city, a geography of grief that seems ripe for revolt. (It reminds you of present-day Los Angeles.) In the classical sense, tragedy is inevitable. The events of Bus 174 are closer to farce, where human weakness turns minor situations into catastrophes. There's no tragic flaw, just a collection of missteps that finally outweighs all reason.

Bus 174

Directed by José Padilha A THINKFILM release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

recommended

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there