 
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
              
|
Movie Review: 'Central Station' Grand 'Central Station': Oscar-nominated performance lifts this soulful Brazilian film Friday, February 12, 1999 By Barry Paris, Post-Gazette Movie Critic
If there is a more beautiful homely face in the world than Fernanda Montenegro's, I've never seen it. And if a more soulful film than hers has graced the screen this year, I haven't seen it either.
"Central Station" is the latest and best proof of the astonishing artistic quality and humanist depth of the Brazilian movie industry.
Brazil? You say you haven't seen a helluva lot of Brazilian films? Neither have most Hollywood-weaned North Americans, which is why you must do your heart the favor of seeing this one, to remind yourself what filmmaking is supposed to be - but, alas, rarely is: the creation of a self-contained universe inhabited by human beings (rather than heroes and villains and Ewoks) we never knew before but from now on will never forget.
There are two such human beings in Rio de Janeiro's jam-packed main commuter station. The first is Dora (Montenegro), a cynical old con artist who charges illiterate customers a hefty fee to write letters for them and then, instead of mailing them, takes them home to mock their simple sentiments and throw them away. The second is a 9-year-old boy named Josue (Vinicius de Oliveira), whose mother is killed in a traffic accident moments after paying Dora to write a letter to the husband and father who has abandoned them.
Dora is a liar and a thief, thoroughly unloving and unloved for good reason. She has no heart of gold. She's the last person in the world to take an interest in a now-homeless boy who must sleep in the train station - until hitting on the idea of luring him home with her on a maternal pretense with the real purpose of selling him to an orphanage.
Then she repents - still without golden heart - and joins forces with the kid for a quixotic cross-country bus trip in search of the boy's long-lost father in the remote hinterlands.
That does not do justice to the complexities of a superb script by Joao Emanuel Carneiro and Marcos Bernstein, neither of whom has ever previously written a screenplay. Nor can I convey the beauty of the 67-year-old Montenegro's performance - just nominated, I'm thrilled to say, for a Best Actress Oscar. She bears an uncanny resemblance to the elderly Giulietta Masina. She is superb. There is nothing remotely likable about her character until quite late in the film. But there is everything real about her and the fabulous rural and religious Brazilian situations (particularly the "House of Miracles") in which she finds herself.
There is everything likable, as well as real, about young Vinicius de Oliveira - in real life, a shoeshine boy who not only never acted in a movie before but had never even seen one!
And there is something unearthly beautiful about the Portuguese language - a kind of cross between Spanish and French which, though we don't understand a word of it, we can nevertheless often somehow "understand" from the passionate nuances of its inflections.
As a powerful study (and character study) in approach-avoidance, neither Montenegro nor "Central Station" can be beat. Likewise for the panoramic photography and perfect musical score.
Neither Fernanda Montenegro - basically, a stage actress little known to movie audiences before this - nor the film will win the awards for which they're nominated. But it is fine and fitting that they've at least been recognized.
|
||||||||||||||||||||
RATING: PG-13 for adult themes