LINHA DE PASSE
The name is about the line in soccer where the player has to pass the ball to make a goal and win the match. It tells the story about a cleaning lady about 40 years old who raises 4 male kids alone and is pregnant of the 5th. The first three kids are from the same father and white, the youngest one is from a black father and he never met him. And the pregnancy we don't know who the father is. They all live on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, the largest and richest city of Latin America with almost 20 million inhabitants and responsible for more than 20 percent of the GDP of Brazil.
I saw this movie yesterday night and still i am thinking about it. The theater was empty and I guess it hasn't been a great success. It started very slow and boring and I thought to myself that it would be a film just exploiting the passion for soccer in Brazil, but then after the first 5 or so minutes you just get into the story of this touching family who has everything to be apart of adrift but are naturally connected and have a complicity of their own.
For me this movie is very realistic and shows the lives of many contemporary Brazilians who are living poorly and trying to become something in life beside all the riches around them, cleaning for them, delivering for them, playing soccer for them, driving for them and in the end stealing from them as an act of desperation and no solution.
But each of them have a dream and they live by it:
The mother: just wants to raise her kids and see her team win the championship
Older boy: is trying to be a soccer player the only way out for him but his too old already to be taken by any team and falls into the corrupted clubs who asks him 3000 reais as a bribe to sign with them
Second brother: the Latin lover of the family just wants money to raise his own kid who lives with the mother but is always fucking some other girl every other nigh and in order to pay all the expenses ends up stealing money with his motorcycle on the stoplights of the city
Third brother: He just want to pray on the evangelic religion very spread up Brazil where the poor people believe on the power of Jesus but asks the people for ten percent of their income. He is honest but discovers during his journey on the film that it doesn't always pay and also him will crack one day.
Fourth brother: the youngest, still in elementary school but already very old for his age, smart and full of language he's just obsessed to find his father who was a bus driver and spends all free time riding buses driven by black guys around the town.
The directors have chosen to portray a city that is harsh and has no beauty as the city that this kind of poor class people know and yet it's showed in a very real way showing the solidarity among the Brazilians and that in spite of their poor lives this family hangs on, happy as they can be.
The main actress totally deserved her "Palm for best actress" in Cannes Film Festival 2008. Finally one good movie from Brazil that's not cliché about "favelas" and drug dealing and criminality but just poor class, hard life people portrayed in a very subtle and gentle way by the directors. Bravo for both.
Final words: WATCH IT and let yourself get involved by the excruciating reality of the life of these family!
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